Graphical One-Sided Markets

TL;DR

This paper extends one-sided market models by incorporating local neighbourhood externalities, analyzing the existence, computation, and properties of stable and envy-free allocations in complex graph-based settings.

Contribution

It introduces a new model with neighbourhood externalities, establishes existence and computational complexity results for stable allocations, and explores envy-freeness in this context.

Findings

Stable allocations may not always exist in general models.

A 2-stable allocation exists for symmetric neighbourhood graphs.

Computing a 2-stable allocation is PLS-complete; checking existence in asymmetric graphs is NP-complete.

Abstract

We study the problem of allocating indivisible objects to a set of rational agents where each agent's final utility depends on the intrinsic valuation of the allocated item as well as the allocation within the agent's local neighbourhood. We specify agents' local neighbourhood in terms of a weighted graph. This extends the model of one-sided markets to incorporate neighbourhood externalities. We consider the solution concept of stability and show that, unlike in the case of one-sided markets, stable allocations may not always exist. When the underlying local neighbourhood graph is symmetric, a 2-stable allocation is guaranteed to exist and any decentralised mechanism where pairs of rational players agree to exchange objects terminates in such an allocation. We show that computing a 2-stable allocation is PLS-complete and further identify subclasses which are tractable. In the case of asymmetric neighbourhood structures, we show that it is NP-complete to check if a 2-stable allocation exists. We then identify structural restrictions where stable allocations always exist and can be computed efficiently. Finally, we study the notion of envy-freeness in this framework.