Approximate Core Allocations for Multiple Partners Matching Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces an LP-based mechanism for approximate core allocations in multiple partners matching games, guaranteeing at least two-thirds of each coalition's profit, and extends prior work from simple matching to more complex scenarios.

Contribution

It provides the first LP-based approximation mechanism for the core in multiple partners matching games, generalizing previous results from standard matching games.

Findings

Guarantees no coalition receives less than 2/3 of its profit.

Proves 2/3 is the optimal approximation factor.

Extends approximate core results from matching to multiple partners matching games.

Abstract

The matching game is a cooperative game where the value of every coalition is the maximum revenue of players in the coalition can make by forming pairwise disjoint partners. The multiple partners matching game generalizes the matching game by allowing each player to have more than one possibly repeated partner. In this paper, we study profit-sharing in multiple partners matching games. A central concept for profit-sharing is the core which consists of all possible ways of distributing the profit among individual players such that the grand coalition remains intact. The core of multiple partners matching games may be empty [Deng et al., Algorithmic aspects of the core of combinatorial optimization games, Math. Oper. Res., 1999.]; even when the core is non-empty, the core membership problem is intractable in general [Biro et al., The stable fixtures problem with payments, Games Econ. Behav., 2018]. Thus we study approximate core allocations upon which a coalition may be paid less than the profit it makes by seceding from the grand coalition. We provide an LP-based mechanism guaranteeing that no coalition is paid less than $2/3$ times the profit it makes on its own. We also show that $2/3$ is the best possible factor relative to the underlying LP-relaxation. Our result generalizes the work of Vazirani [Vazirani, The general graph matching game: approximate core, arXiv, 2021] from matching games to multiple partners matching games.