38 research outputs found
Precise Complexity of the Core in Dichotomous and Additive Hedonic Games
Hedonic games provide a general model of coalition formation, in which a set
of agents is partitioned into coalitions, with each agent having preferences
over which other players are in her coalition. We prove that with additively
separable preferences, it is -complete to decide whether a core- or
strict-core-stable partition exists, extending a result of Woeginger (2013).
Our result holds even if valuations are symmetric and non-zero only for a
constant number of other agents. We also establish -completeness of
deciding non-emptiness of the strict core for hedonic games with dichotomous
preferences. Such results establish that the core is much less tractable than
solution concepts such as individual stability.Comment: ADT-2017, 15 pages in LNCS styl
Fairly Allocating Contiguous Blocks of Indivisible Items
In this paper, we study the classic problem of fairly allocating indivisible
items with the extra feature that the items lie on a line. Our goal is to find
a fair allocation that is contiguous, meaning that the bundle of each agent
forms a contiguous block on the line. While allocations satisfying the
classical fairness notions of proportionality, envy-freeness, and equitability
are not guaranteed to exist even without the contiguity requirement, we show
the existence of contiguous allocations satisfying approximate versions of
these notions that do not degrade as the number of agents or items increases.
We also study the efficiency loss of contiguous allocations due to fairness
constraints.Comment: Appears in the 10th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game
Theory (SAGT), 201
"Almost stable" matchings in the Roommates problem
An instance of the classical Stable Roommates problem (SR) need not admit a stable matching. This motivates the problem of finding a matching that is “as stable as possible”, i.e. admits the fewest number of blocking pairs. In this paper we prove that, given an SR instance with n agents, in which all preference lists are complete, the problem of finding a matching with the fewest number of blocking pairs is NP-hard and not approximable within n^{\frac{1}{2}-\varepsilon}, for any \varepsilon>0, unless P=NP. If the preference lists contain ties, we improve this result to n^{1-\varepsilon}. Also, we show that, given an integer K and an SR instance I in which all preference lists are complete, the problem of deciding whether I admits a matching with exactly K blocking pairs is NP-complete. By contrast, if K is constant, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that finds a matching with at most (or exactly) K blocking pairs, or reports that no such matching exists. Finally, we give upper and lower bounds for the minimum number of blocking pairs over all matchings in terms of some properties of a stable partition, given an SR instance I
Pareto Optimal Matchings in Many-to-Many Markets with Ties
We consider Pareto-optimal matchings (POMs) in a many-to-many market of
applicants and courses where applicants have preferences, which may include
ties, over individual courses and lexicographic preferences over sets of
courses. Since this is the most general setting examined so far in the
literature, our work unifies and generalizes several known results.
Specifically, we characterize POMs and introduce the \emph{Generalized Serial
Dictatorship Mechanism with Ties (GSDT)} that effectively handles ties via
properties of network flows. We show that GSDT can generate all POMs using
different priority orderings over the applicants, but it satisfies truthfulness
only for certain such orderings. This shortcoming is not specific to our
mechanism; we show that any mechanism generating all POMs in our setting is
prone to strategic manipulation. This is in contrast to the one-to-one case
(with or without ties), for which truthful mechanisms generating all POMs do
exist
Approximation algorithms for hard variants of the stable marriage and hospitals/residents problems
When ties and incomplete preference lists are permitted in the Stable Marriage and Hospitals/Residents problems, stable matchings can have different sizes. The problem of finding a maximum cardinality stable matching in this context is known to be NP-hard, even under very severe restrictions on the number, size and position of ties. In this paper, we describe polynomial-time 5/3-approximation algorithms for variants of these problems in which ties are on one side only and at the end of the preference lists. The particular variant is motivated by important applications in large scale centralised matching schemes
Parameterized Algorithms for Generalizations of Directed Feedback Vertex Set
The Directed Feedback Vertex Set (DFVS) problem takes as input a directed
graph~ and seeks a smallest vertex set~ that hits all cycles in . This
is one of Karp's 21 -complete problems. Resolving the
parameterized complexity status of DFVS was a long-standing open problem until
Chen et al. [STOC 2008, J. ACM 2008] showed its fixed-parameter tractability
via a -time algorithm, where .
Here we show fixed-parameter tractability of two generalizations of DFVS:
- Find a smallest vertex set such that every strong component of
has size at most~: we give an algorithm solving this problem in time
. This generalizes an algorithm by Xiao
[JCSS 2017] for the undirected version of the problem.
- Find a smallest vertex set such that every non-trivial strong component
of is 1-out-regular: we give an algorithm solving this problem in time
.
We also solve the corresponding arc versions of these problems by
fixed-parameter algorithms