Strategy Proof Mechanisms for Facility Location with Capacity Limits

TL;DR

This paper explores how capacity limits in facility location problems complicate strategy-proof mechanism design but can paradoxically enhance approximation guarantees for solutions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that capacity constraints, while complicating strategy-proof mechanism design, can actually lead to better approximation guarantees in facility location problems.

Findings

Capacity constraints make strategy-proof mechanism design more challenging.

Counter-intuitively, capacity limits can improve approximation guarantees.

The paper provides new insights into facility location with capacity constraints.

Abstract

An important feature of many real world facility location problems are capacity limits on the facilities. We show here how capacity constraints make it harder to design strategy proof mechanisms for facility location, but counter-intuitively can improve the guarantees on how well we can approximate the optimal solution.