A sublogarithmic approximation for highway and tollbooth pricing

DOI10.1007/978-3-642-14165-2_49zbMATH Open1288.68265arXiv1002.2084OpenAlexW1505323399MaRDI QIDQ3587409FDOQ3587409

Danny Segev, Iftah Gamzu

Publication date: 7 September 2010

Published in: Automata, Languages and Programming (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: An instance of the tollbooth problem consists of an undirected network and a collection of single-minded customers, each of which is interested in purchasing a fixed path subject to an individual budget constraint. The objective is to assign a per-unit price to each edge in a way that maximizes the collective revenue obtained from all customers. The revenue generated by any customer is equal to the overall price of the edges in her desired path, when this cost falls within her budget; otherwise, that customer will not purchase any edge. Our main result is a deterministic algorithm for the tollbooth problem on trees whose approximation ratio is O(log m / log log m), where m denotes the number of edges in the underlying graph. This finding improves on the currently best performance guarantees for trees, due to Elbassioni et al. (SAGT '09), as well as for paths (commonly known as the highway problem), due to Balcan and Blum (EC '06). An additional interesting consequence is a computational separation between tollbooth pricing on trees and the original prototype problem of single-minded unlimited supply pricing, under a plausible hardness hypothesis due to Demaine et al. (SODA '06).

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1002.2084

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Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Programming involving graphs or networks (90C35) Analysis of algorithms and problem complexity (68Q25) Approximation algorithms (68W25)

Cited In (8)

• On the complexity of the highway problem
• Improved approximation for orienting mixed graphs
• Graph pricing with limited supply
• Highway toll pricing
• Pricing on paths: a PTAS for the highway problem
• An LP-rounding \(2\sqrt{2}\)-approximation for restricted maximum acyclic subgraph
• Title not available (Why is that?)
• Title not available (Why is that?)

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