Nash Welfare in the Facility Location Problem

Nash Welfare in the Facility Location Problem

Alexander Lam

Proceedings of the Thirtieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Doctoral Consortium. Pages 4897-4898. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2021/680

In most facility location research, either an efficient facility placement which minimizes the total cost or a fairer placement which minimizes the maximum cost are typically proposed. To find a solution that is both fair and efficient, we propose converting the agent costs to utilities and placing the facility/ies such that the product of utilities, also known as the Nash welfare, is maximized. We ask whether the Nash welfare's well-studied balance between fairness and efficiency also applies to the facility location setting, and what agent strategic behaviour may occur under this facility placement.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Computational Social Choice
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Voting