Chapter

Internet and Network Economics

Volume 4286 of the series Lecture Notes in Computer Science pp 112-123

Optimal Cost-Sharing Mechanisms for Steiner Forest Problems

  • Shuchi ChawlaAffiliated withDepartment of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison
  • , Tim RoughgardenAffiliated withDepartment of Computer Science, Stanford University
  • , Mukund SundararajanAffiliated withDepartment of Computer Science, Stanford University

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Abstract

Könemann, Leonardi, and Schäfer [14] gave a 2-budget-balanced and groupstrategyproof mechanism for Steiner forest cost-sharing problems. We prove that this mechanism also achieves an O(log2 k)-approximation of the social cost, where k is the number of players. As a consequence, the KLS mechanism has the smallest-possible worst-case efficiency loss, up to constant factors, among all O(1)-budget-balanced Moulin mechanisms for such cost functions. We also extend our results to a more general network design problem.