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arXiv · 0812.0320

Stackelberg Network Pricing is Hard to Approximate

Gwenaël Joret
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Abstract

In the Stackelberg Network Pricing problem, one has to assign tariffs to a certain subset of the arcs of a given transportation network. The aim is to maximize the amount paid by the user of the network, knowing that the user will take a shortest st-path once the tariffs are fixed. Roch, Savard, and Marcotte (Networks, Vol. 46(1), 57-67, 2005) proved that this problem is NP-hard, and gave an O(log m)-approximation algorithm, where m denote the number of arcs to be priced. In this note, we show that the problem is also APX-hard.

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Gwenaël Joret. 2008-12-01. Stackelberg Network Pricing is Hard to Approximate. https://doi.org/10.1002/net.20391

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