Strategyproof Mechanisms for One-Dimensional Hybrid and Obnoxious Facility Location

We consider a strategic variant of the facility location problem. We would like to locate a facility on a closed interval. There are n agents located on that interval, divided into two types: type 1 agents, who wish for the facility to be as far from them as possible, and type 2 agents, who wish for the facility to be as close to them as possible. Our goal is to maximize a form of aggregated social benefit: maxisum- the sum of the agents' utilities, or the egalitarian objective- the minimal agent utility. The strategic aspect of the problem is that the agents' locations are not known to us, but rather reported to us by the agents- an agent might misreport his location in an attempt to move the facility away from or towards to his true location. We therefore require the facility-locating mechanism to be strategyproof, namely that reporting truthfully is a dominant strategy for each agent. As simply maximizing the social benefit is generally not strategyproof, our goal is to design strategyproof mechanisms with good approximation ratios. For the maxisum objective, in the deterministic setting, we provide a best-possible 3- approximate strategyproof mechanism; in the randomized setting, we provide a 23/13- approximate strategyproof mechanism and a lower bound of frac2√3. For the egalitarian objective, we provide a lower bound of 3/2 in the randomized setting, and show that no bounded approximation ratio is attainable in the deterministic setting. To obtain our deterministic lower bounds, we characterize all deterministic strategyproof mechanisms when all agents are of type 1. Finally, we consider a generalized model that allows an agent to control more than one location, and provide best-possible 3- and 3/2- approximate strategyproof mechanisms for maxisum, in the deterministic and randomized settings respectively, when only type 1 agents are present.