Hedonic Seat Arrangement Problems

Abstract

In this paper, we study a variant of hedonic games, called \textsc{Seat Arrangement}. The model is defined by a bijection from agents with preferences for each other to vertices in a graph $G$. The utility of an agent depends on the neighbors assigned in the graph. More precisely, it is the sum over all neighbors of the preferences that the agent has towards the agent assigned to the neighbor. We first consider the price of stability and fairness for different classes of preferences. In particular, we show that there is an instance such that the price of fairness ({\sf PoF}) is unbounded in general. Moreover, we show an upper bound $\tilde{d}(G)$ and an almost tight lower bound $\tilde{d}(G)-1/4$ of {\sf PoF}, where $\tilde{d}(G)$ is the average degree of an input graph. Then we investigate the computational complexity of problems to find certain ``good'' seat arrangements, say \textsc{Utilitarian Arrangement}, \textsc{Egalitarian Arrangement}, \textsc{Stable Arrangement}, and \textsc{Envy-free Arrangement}. We give dichotomies of computational complexity of four \textsc{Seat Arrangement} problems from the perspective of the maximum order of connected components in an input graph. For the parameterized complexity, \textsc{Utilitarian Arrangement} can be solved in time $n^{O(\gamma)}$, while it cannot be solved in time $f(\gamma)n^{o(\gamma)}$ under ETH, where $n$ is the number of agents and $\gamma$ is the vertex cover number of an input graph. Moreover, we show that \textsc{Egalitarian Arrangement} and \textsc{Envy-free Arrangement} are weakly NP-hard even on graphs of bounded vertex cover number. Finally, we prove that determining whether a stable arrangement can be obtained from a given arrangement by $k$ swaps is W[1]-hard when parameterized by $k+\gamma$, whereas it can be solved in time $n^{O(k)}$.