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Cost-Sharing Mechanisms for Network Design

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Abstract

We consider a single-source network design problem from a game-theoretic perspective. Gupta, Kumar and Roughgarden (Proc. 35th Annual ACM STOC, pp. 365–372, 2003) developed a simple method for a single-source rent-or-buy problem that also yields the best-known approximation ratio for the problem. We show how to use a variant of this method to develop an approximately budget-balanced and group strategyproof cost-sharing method for the problem.

The novelty of our approach stems from our obtaining the cost-sharing methods for the rent-or-buy problem by carefully combining cost-shares for the simpler Steiner tree problem. Our algorithm is conceptually simpler than the previous such cost-sharing method due to Pál and Tardos (Proc. 44th Annual FOCS, pp. 584–593, 2003), and improves the previously-known approximation factor of 15 to 4.6.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 15232, USA

    Anupam Gupta

  2. Department of Computer Science and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland at College Park, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Aravind Srinivasan

  3. Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 14853, USA

    Éva Tardos

Authors
  1. Anupam Gupta
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  2. Aravind Srinivasan
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  3. Éva Tardos
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anupam Gupta.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this work appears in the Proc. International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization Problems, 2004. This research was done in part during the IMA Workshop on Network Management and Design at the University of Minnesota, April 2003.

A. Gupta supported in part by an NSF CAREER award CCF-0448095, and by an Alfred P. Sloan Fellowship.

A. Srinivasan supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0208005 and ITR Award CNS-0426683.

Research of É. Tardos supported in part by ONR grant N00014-98-1-0589, and NSF grants CCR-0311333 and CCR-0325453.

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Gupta, A., Srinivasan, A. & Tardos, É. Cost-Sharing Mechanisms for Network Design. Algorithmica 50, 98–119 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-007-9065-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-007-9065-y

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