Optimality of the coordinate-wise median mechanism for strategyproof facility location in two dimensions

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Abstract

We consider the facility location problem in two dimensions. In particular, we consider a setting where agents have Euclidean preferences, defined by their ideal points, for a facility to be located in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We show that for the $p-norm$ ($p \geq 1$) objective, the coordinate-wise median mechanism (CM) has the lowest worst-case approximation ratio in the class of deterministic, anonymous, and strategyproof mechanisms. For the minisum objective and an odd number of agents $n$, we show that CM has a worst-case approximation ratio (AR) of $\sqrt{2}\frac{\sqrt{n^2+1}}{n+1}$. For the $p-norm$ social cost objective ($p\geq 2$), we find that the AR for CM is bounded above by $2^{\frac{3}{2}-\frac{2}{p}}$. We conjecture that the AR of CM actually equals the lower bound $2^{1-\frac{1}{p}}$ (as is the case for $p=2$ and $p=\infty$) for any $p\geq 2$.