Polynomial size IP formulations of knapsack may require exponentially large coefficients

Abstract

A desirable property of integer formulations is to consist of few inequalities having small coefficients. We show that these targets are conflicting by proving the existence of knapsack sets that need exponentially many inequalities or exponentially large coefficients in any integer formulation. Moreover, we show that there exist undirected graphs such that (in a natural model) every integer formulation of stable sets requires exponentially large coefficients if the number of non-trivial inequalities is bounded by a constant.