Applications of approximation algorithms to cooperative games
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Group Strategyproof Mechanisms via Primal-Dual Algorithms
FOCS '03 Proceedings of the 44th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
An efficient cost-sharing mechanism for the prize-collecting Steiner forest problem
SODA '07 Proceedings of the eighteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
A Group-Strategyproof Cost Sharing Mechanism for the Steiner Forest Game
SIAM Journal on Computing
Limitations of cross-monotonic cost-sharing schemes
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
On the Hardness of Being Truthful
FOCS '08 Proceedings of the 2008 49th Annual IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Inapproximability of Combinatorial Public Projects
WINE '08 Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Internet and Network Economics
Strategyproof cost-sharing mechanisms for set cover and facility location games
Decision Support Systems - Special issue: The fourth ACM conference on electronic commerce
Cost sharing methods for makespan and completion time scheduling
STACS'07 Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Computation and incentives in combinatorial public projects
Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce
A complete characterization of group-strategyproof mechanisms of cost-sharing
ESA'10 Proceedings of the 18th annual European conference on Algorithms: Part I
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A cost-sharing mechanism defines how to share the cost of a service among serviced customers. It solicits bids from potential customers and selects a subset of customers to serve and a price to charge each of them. The mechanism is group-strategyproof if no subset of customers can gain by lying about their values. There is a rich literature that designs group-strategyproof cost-sharing mechanisms using schemes that satisfy a property called cross-monotonicity. Unfortunately, Immorlica et al. showed that for many services, cross-monotonic schemes are provably not budget-balanced, i.e., they can recover only a fraction of the cost. While cross-monotonicity is a sufficient condition for designing group-strategyproof mechanisms, it is not necessary. Pountourakis and Vidali recently provided a complete characterization of group-strategyproof mechanisms. We construct a fully budget-balanced cost-sharing mechanism for the edge-cover problem that is not cross-monotonic and we apply their characterization to show that it is group-strategyproof. This improves upon the cross-monotonic approach which can recover only half the cost, and provides a proof-of-concept as to the usefulness of the complete characterization. This raises the question of whether all "natural" problems have budget-balanced group-strategyproof mechanisms. We answer this question in the negative by designing a set-cover instance in which no group-strategyproof mechanism can recover more than a (18/19)-fraction of the cost.