Cost-Sharing Mechanisms for Network Design

We consider a single-source network design problem from a game-theoretic perspective. Gupta, Kumar and Roughgarden (Proc. 35th Annual ACM STOC, pages 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 P´al and Tardos (Proc. 44th Annual FOCS, pages 584–593, 2003), and improves the previously-known approximation factor of 15 to 4.6.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: APPROX
• Authors: Anupam Gupta, Aravind Srinivasan, Éva Tardos
• Keywords: Algorithms, APPROX 2004, Cost-sharing Method, Rent-or-buy Problem, Single-source Rent-or-buy Problem