Stabilization of Capacitated Matching Games

An edge-weighted, vertex-capacitated graph G is called stable if the value of a maximum-weight capacity-matching equals the value of a maximum-weight fractional capacity-matching. Stable graphs play a key role in characterizing the existence of stable solutions for popular combinatorial games that involve the structure of matchings in graphs, such as network bargaining games and cooperative matching games. The vertex-stabilizer problem asks to compute a minimum number of players to block (i.e., vertices of G to remove) in order to ensure stability for such games. The problem has been shown to be solvable in polynomial-time, for unit-capacity graphs. This stays true also if we impose the restriction that the set of players to block must not intersect with a given specified maximum matching of G. In this work, we investigate these algorithmic problems in the more general setting of arbitrary capacities. We show that the vertex-stabilizer problem with the additional restriction of avoiding a given maximum matching remains polynomial-time solvable. Differently, without this restriction, the vertex-stabilizer problem becomes NP-hard and even hard to approximate, in contrast to the unit-capacity case. Finally, in unit-capacity graphs there is an equivalence between the stability of a graph, existence of a stable solution for network bargaining games, and existence of a stable solution for cooperative matching games. We show that this equivalence does not extend to the capacitated case.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figure

Choose your witnesses wisely

This paper addresses a graph optimization problem, called the Witness Tree problem, which seeks a spanning tree of a graph minimizing a certain non-linear objective function. This problem is of interest because it plays a crucial role in the analysis of the best approximation algorithms for two fundamental network design problems: Steiner Tree and Node-Tree Augmentation. We will show how a wiser choice of witness trees leads to an improved approximation for Node-Tree Augmentation, and for Steiner Tree in special classes of graphs.Comment: 33 pages, 7 figures, submitted to IPCO 202

On finding another room-partitioning of the vertices

Let T be a triangulated surface given by the list of vertex-triples of its triangles, called rooms. A room-partitioning of T is a subset R of the rooms such that each vertex of T is in exactly one room in R. We prove that if T has a room-partitioning R, then there is another room-partitioning of T which is different from R. The proof is a simple algorithm which walks from room to room, which however we show to be exponential by constructing a sequence of (planar) instances, where the algorithm walks from room to room an exponential number of times relative to the number of rooms in the instance. We unify the above theorem with Nash’s theorem stating that a 2-person game has an equilibrium, by proving a combinatorially simple common generalization