A Combinatorial Polynomial Algorithm for the Linear Arrow-Debreu Market

We present the first combinatorial polynomial time algorithm for computing the equilibrium of the Arrow-Debreu market model with linear utilities.Comment: Preliminary version in ICALP 201

Matroid Online Bipartite Matching and Vertex Cover

The Adwords and Online Bipartite Matching problems have enjoyed a renewed attention over the past decade due to their connection to Internet advertising. Our community has contributed, among other things, new models (notably stochastic) and extensions to the classical formulations to address the issues that arise from practical needs. In this paper, we propose a new generalization based on matroids and show that many of the previous results extend to this more general setting. Because of the rich structures and expressive power of matroids, our new setting is potentially of interest both in theory and in practice. In the classical version of the problem, the offline side of a bipartite graph is known initially while vertices from the online side arrive one at a time along with their incident edges. The objective is to maintain a decent approximate matching from which no edge can be removed. Our generalization, called Matroid Online Bipartite Matching, additionally requires that the set of matched offline vertices be independent in a given matroid. In particular, the case of partition matroids corresponds to the natural scenario where each advertiser manages multiple ads with a fixed total budget. Our algorithms attain the same performance as the classical version of the problems considered, which are often provably the best possible. We present $1-1/e$-competitive algorithms for Matroid Online Bipartite Matching under the small bid assumption, as well as a $1-1/e$-competitive algorithm for Matroid Online Bipartite Matching in the random arrival model. A key technical ingredient of our results is a carefully designed primal-dual waterfilling procedure that accommodates for matroid constraints. This is inspired by the extension of our recent charging scheme for Online Bipartite Vertex Cover.Comment: 19 pages, to appear in EC'1

On the Equivalence of the Bidirected and Hypergraphic Relaxations for Steiner Tree

The bottleneck of the currently best (ln(4)+ε)-approximation algorithm for the NP-hard Steiner tree problem is the solution of its large, so called hypergraphic, linear programming relaxation (HYP). Hypergraphic LPs are NP-hard to solve exactly, and it is a formidable computational task to even approximate them sufficiently well. We focus on another well-studied but poorly understood LP relaxation of the problem: the bidirected cut relaxation (BCR). This LP is compact, and can therefore be solved efficiently. Its integrality gap is known to be greater than 1.16, and while this is widely conjectured to be close to the real answer, only a (trivial) upper bound of 2 is known. In this paper, we give an efficient constructive proof that BCR and HYP are polyhedrally equivalent in instances that do not have an (edge-induced) claw on Steiner vertices, i.e., they do not contain a Steiner vertex with 3 Steiner neighbors. This implies faster ln(4)-approximations for these graphs, and is a significant step forward from the previously known equivalence for (so called quasi-bipartite) instances in which Steiner vertices form an independent set. We complement our results by showing that even restricting to instances where Steiner vertices induce one single star, determining whether the two relaxations are equivalent is NP-hard

On budget-balanced group-strategyproof cost sharing mechanisms

A cost-sharing mechanism defines how to share the cost of a service among serviced customers. It solicits bids from potential customers and selects a subset of customers to serve and a price to charge each of them. The mechanism is group-strategyproof if no subset of customers can gain by lying about their values. There is a rich literature that designs group-strategyproof cost-sharing mechanisms using schemes that satisfy a property called cross-monotonicity. Unfortunately, Immorlica et al showed that for many services, cross-monotonic schemes are provably not budget-balanced, i.e., they can recover only a fraction of the cost. While cross-monotonicity is a sufficient condition for designing group-strategyproof mechanisms, it is not necessary. Pountourakis and Vidali recently provided a complete characterization of group-strategyproof mechanisms. Using their characterization, we construct a fully budget-balanced group-strategyproof mechanism for the edge-cover problem. This improves upon the cross-monotonic approach which can recover only half the cost, and provides a proof-of-concept as to the usefullness of the complete characterization. This raises the question of whether all “natural ” problems have budget-balanced group-strategyproof mechanisms. We answer this question in the negative b