Proceedings

Equitable Mechanism Design for Facility Location

Toby Walsh

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Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence. Main Track. Pages 275-283.

https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/32

Keywords

  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Resource allocation
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Agent theories and models
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: MAS: Applications
  • Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: General

Abstract

We consider strategy proof mechanisms for facility location which maximize equitability between agents. As is common in the literature, we measure equitability with the Gini index. We first prove a simple but fundamental impossibility result that no strategy proof mechanism can bound the approximation ratio of the optimal Gini index of utilities for one or more facilities. We propose instead computing approximation ratios of the complemented Gini index of utilities, and consider how well both deterministic and randomized mechanisms approximate this. In addition, as Nash welfare is often put forwards as an equitable compromise between egalitarain and utilitarian outcomes, we consider how well mechanisms approximate the Nash welfare.

Toby Walsh. 2025. Equitable Mechanism Design for Facility Location. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IJCAI-25. IJCAI, 275–283. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2025/32
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