Mechanism Design for Bridge Location with Optional Preferences

Abstract: We study the bridge location problem with optional preferences, where two separated regions each contain one prelocated facility. Each agent has a private location and a private preference specifying a nonempty subset of the two facilities in which she is interested. Her individual cost is measured by one of three natural variants: the maximum, the sum, or the minimum of her distances to the facilities in which she is interested. The social planner must design deterministic strategyproof mechanisms that elicit truthful reports, choose the location of a connecting bridge, and approximately minimize either the social cost or the maximum cost. Our main results are as follows. For the social cost objective, we design optimal mechanisms for the max-variant and sum-variant costs, and provide a 3-approximation mechanism for the min-variant cost, and establish a lower bound of 2 for the min-variant. For the maximum cost objective, we give 5/3-approximation mechanisms for the max-variant and sum-variant costs, and a 3-approximation mechanism for the min-variant cost; we also prove a common lower bound of 5/3 that applies to all three cost variants under the maximum cost objective.