The Obnoxious Facility Location Game with Dichotomous Preferences

TL;DR

This paper studies a facility location game with agents on a path and heterogeneous facilities, proposing mechanisms that optimize social welfare or fairness, with proven bounds on strategyproofness and approximation ratios.

Contribution

It introduces new strategyproof mechanisms for facility placement with dichotomous preferences, achieving specific approximation ratios and extending results to cycles and squares.

Findings

Mechanisms for up to three facilities with group-strategyproofness and approximation guarantees.

A strategyproof egalitarian mechanism for any number of facilities.

Lower bounds on approximation ratios for strategyproof mechanisms.

Abstract

We consider a facility location game in which $n$ agents reside at known locations on a path, and $k$ heterogeneous facilities are to be constructed on the path. Each agent is adversely affected by some subset of the facilities, and is unaffected by the others. We design two classes of mechanisms for choosing the facility locations given the reported agent preferences: utilitarian mechanisms that strive to maximize social welfare (i.e., to be efficient), and egalitarian mechanisms that strive to maximize the minimum welfare. For the utilitarian objective, we present a weakly group-strategyproof efficient mechanism for up to three facilities, we give strongly group-strategyproof mechanisms that achieve approximation ratios of $5/3$ and $2$ for $k=1$ and $k > 1$, respectively, and we prove that no strongly group-strategyproof mechanism achieves an approximation ratio less than $5/3$ for the case of a single facility. For the egalitarian objective, we present a strategyproof egalitarian mechanism for arbitrary $k$, and we prove that no weakly group-strategyproof mechanism achieves a $o(\sqrt{n})$ approximation ratio for two facilities. We extend our egalitarian results to the case where the agents are located on a cycle, and we extend our first egalitarian result to the case where the agents are located in the unit square.