Welfare Loss in Connected Resource Allocation
Welfare Loss in Connected Resource Allocation
Xiaohui Bei, Alexander Lam, Xinhang Lu, Warut Suksompong
Proceedings of the Thirty-Third International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main Track. Pages 2660-2668.
https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2024/294
We study the allocation of indivisible goods that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian welfare. Specifically, we introduce the concept of egalitarian (resp., utilitarian) price of connectivity, which captures the worst-case ratio between the optimal egalitarian (resp., utilitarian) welfare among all allocations and that among the connected allocations. We provide tight or asymptotically tight bounds on the price of connectivity for various large classes of graphs when there are two agents, and for paths, stars and cycles in the general case. Many of our results are supplemented with algorithms which find connected allocations with a welfare guarantee corresponding to the price of connectivity.
Keywords:
Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: GTEP: Fair division
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Resource allocation