Approximation algorithms for the Transportation Problem with Market Choice and related models

Abstract: Given facilities with capacities and clients with penalties and demands, the transportation problem with market choice consists in finding the minimum-cost way to partition the clients into unserved clients, paying the penalties, and into served clients, paying the transportation cost to serve them. We give polynomial-time reductions from this problem and variants to the (un)capacitated facility location problem, directly yielding approximation algorithms, two with constant factors in the metric case, one with a logarithmic factor in the general case.