Cost Sharing and Strategyproof Mechanisms for Set Cover Games

Abstract. We develop for set cover games several general cost-sharing methods that are approximately budget-balanced, core, and/or group-strategyproof. We first study the cost sharing for a single set cover game, which does not have a budget-balanced core. We show that there is no cost allocation method that can always recover more than 1 ln n of the total cost if we require the cost sharing being a core. Here n is the number of all players to be served. We give an efficient cost allocation method that always recovers 1 ln dmax of the total cost, where dmax is the maximum size of all sets. We then study the cost allocation scheme for all induced subgames. It is known that no cost sharing scheme can always recover more than 1 n of the total cost for every subset of players. We give an efficient cost sharing scheme that always recovers at least 1 2n of the total cost for every subset of players and furthermore, our scheme is cross-monotone. When the elements to be covered are selfish...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2005
• Where: STACS
• Authors: Xiang-Yang Li, Zheng Sun, Weizhao Wang
• Keywords: Cost Allocation, Cost Allocation Method, STACS 2005, Theoretical Computer Science, Total Cost