Improved Hardness of Approximation for Stackelberg Shortest-Path Pricing

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Penn collection
Departmental Papers (CIS)
Degree type
Discipline
Subject
Computer Sciences
Funder
Grant number
License
Copyright date
Distributor
Related resources
Author
Briest, Patrick
Chalermsook, Parinya
Laekhanukit, Bundit
Nanongkai, Danupon
Contributor
Abstract

We consider the Stackelberg shortest-path pricing problem, which is defined as follows. Given a graph G with fixed-cost and pricable edges and two distinct vertices s and t, we may assign prices to the pricable edges. Based on the predefined fixed costs and our prices, a customer purchases a cheapest s-t-path in G and we receive payment equal to the sum of prices of pricable edges belonging to the path. Our goal is to find prices maximizing the payment received from the customer. While Stackelberg shortest-path pricing was known to be APX-hard before, we provide the first explicit approximation threshold and prove hardness of approximation within 2−o(1). We also argue that the nicely structured type of instance resulting from our reduction captures most of the challenges we face in dealing with the problem in general and, in particular, we show that the gap between the revenue of an optimal pricing and the only known general upper bound can still be logarithmically large.

Advisor
Date of presentation
2010-12-01
Conference name
Departmental Papers (CIS)
Conference dates
2023-05-17T07:14:52.000
Conference location
Date Range for Data Collection (Start Date)
Date Range for Data Collection (End Date)
Digital Object Identifier
Series name and number
Volume number
Issue number
Publisher
Publisher DOI
Journal Issue
Comments
Briest, P., Chalermsook, P., Khanna, S., Laekhanukit, B., & Nanongkai, D., Improved Hardness of Approximation for Stackelberg Shortest-Path Pricing, Internet and Network Economics-6th International Workshop, WINE 2010, Dec. 2010, doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-17572-5_37 Copyright © 2010, Springer Berlin / Heidelberg
Recommended citation
Collection