Efficient Black-Box Reductions for Separable Cost Sharing

Abstract

In cost sharing games with delays, a set of agents jointly allocates a finite subset of resources. Each resource has a fixed cost that has to be shared by the players, and each agent has a nonshareable player-specific delay for each resource. A prominent example is uncapacitated facility location (UFL), where facilities need to be opened (at a shareable cost) and clients want to connect to opened facilities. Each client pays a cost share and his non-shareable physical connection cost. Given any profile of subsets allocated by the agents, a separable cost sharing protocol determines cost shares that satisfy budget balance on every resource and separability over the resources. Moreover, a separable protocol guarantees existence of pure Nash equilibria in the induced strategic game for the agents. In this paper, we study separable cost sharing protocols in several general combinatorial domains. We provide black-box reductions to reduce the design of a separable cost-sharing protocol to the design of an approximation algorithm for the underlying cost minimization problem. In this way, we obtain new separable cost-sharing protocols in games based on arbitrary player-specific matroids, single-source connection games without delays, and connection games on $n$-series-parallel graphs with delays. All these reductions are efficiently computable - given an initial allocation profile, we obtain a cheaper profile and separable cost shares turning the profile into a pure Nash equilibrium. Hence, in these domains any approximation algorithm can be used to obtain a separable cost sharing protocol with a price of stability bounded by the approximation factor.