Competitive facility location: the Voronoi game

Abstract

We consider a competitive facility location problem with two players. Players alternate placing points, one at a time, into the playing arena, until each of them has placed n points. The arena is then subdivided according to the nearest-neighbor rule, and the player whose points control the larger area wins. We present a winning strategy for the second player, where the arena is a circle or a line segment. We permit variations where players can play more than one point at a time, and show that the first player can ensure that the second player wins by an arbitrarily small margin.