Facility location game with envy ratio

Abstract

We study the one-facility location game on a real line with a new objective called envy ratio. The envy ratio, which is adopted from fair division and represents the egalitarianism, is defined as the maximum over the ratios between any two agents’ utilities. We are interested in designing strategyproof or group strategyproof mechanisms that can minimize the envy ratio objective.We consider the model in two settings that can capture natural scenarios: the facility location and all the agents’ locations are restricted on a fixed interval; every agent’s location can be any point on the real line but the facility location is restricted on a relative interval. In both settings, we obtain the optimal solutions and the best deterministic strategyproof mechanisms which are also group strategyproof. In the first setting, we provide a lower bound for randomized strategyproof mechanisms. In the second setting, we give a lower bound and two upper bounds for randomized strategyproof mechanisms.