Strategyproof Facility Location in Perturbation Stable Instances

TL;DR

This paper investigates strategyproof mechanisms for the $k$-Facility Location problem on the line, showing that stability conditions enable certain mechanisms to achieve good approximation ratios, with both positive and negative results.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of perturbation stability to facilitate strategyproof mechanisms with bounded approximation ratios for $k$-Facility Location.

Findings

Optimal solution is strategyproof in $(2+\sqrt{3})$-stable instances without singleton clusters.

Allocating to the rightmost agent in each cluster yields a strategyproof $(n-2)/2$-approximate mechanism in 5-stable instances.

No deterministic anonymous mechanism can be strategyproof with bounded approximation in $( ext{sqrt}(2)- ext{delta})$-stable instances for $k extgreater 2$.

Abstract

We consider $k$-Facility Location games, where $n$ strategic agents report their locations on the real line, and a mechanism maps them to $k\ge 2$ facilities. Each agent seeks to minimize her distance to the nearest facility. We are interested in (deterministic or randomized) strategyproof mechanisms without payments that achieve a reasonable approximation ratio to the optimal social cost of the agents. To circumvent the inapproximability of $k$-Facility Location by deterministic strategyproof mechanisms, we restrict our attention to perturbation stable instances. An instance of $k$-Facility Location on the line is $\gamma$-perturbation stable (or simply, $\gamma$-stable), for some $\gamma\ge 1$, if the optimal agent clustering is not affected by moving any subset of consecutive agent locations closer to each other by a factor at most $\gamma$. We show that the optimal solution is strategyproof in $(2+\sqrt{3})$-stable instances whose optimal solution does not include any singleton clusters, and that allocating the facility to the agent next to the rightmost one in each optimal cluster (or to the unique agent, for singleton clusters) is strategyproof and $(n-2)/2$-approximate for $5$-stable instances (even if their optimal solution includes singleton clusters). On the negative side, we show that for any $k\ge 3$ and any $\delta > 0$, there is no deterministic anonymous mechanism that achieves a bounded approximation ratio and is strategyproof in $(\sqrt{2}-\delta)$-stable instances. We also prove that allocating the facility to a random agent of each optimal cluster is strategyproof and $2$-approximate in $5$-stable instances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the existence of deterministic (resp. randomized) strategyproof mechanisms with a bounded (resp. constant) approximation ratio is shown for a large and natural class of $k$-Facility Location instances.