AN ADDITIVE APPROXIMATION SCHEME FOR THE NASH SOCIAL WELFARE MAXIMIZATION WITH IDENTICAL ADDITIVE VALUATIONS

Asei Inoue & Yusuke Kobayashi

Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan2025https://doi.org/10.15807/jorsj.68.133article
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What the paper says

We study the problem of efficiently and fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with identical and additive valuations for the goods. The objective is to maximize the Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the agents’ valuations. While maximizing the Nash social welfare is NP-hard, a PTAS for this problem is presented by Nguyen and Rothe. The main contribution of this paper is to design a first additive PTAS for this problem, that is, we give a polynomial-time algorithm that maximizes the Nash social welfare within an additive error ευmax, where ε is an arbitrary positive number and υmax is the maximum utility of goods. The approximation guarantee of our algorithm is better than that of a PTAS. The idea of our algorithm is simple; we apply a preprocessing and then utilize an additive PTAS for the target load balancing problem given recently by Buchem et al. However, a nontrivial amount of work is required to evaluate the additive error of the output.

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https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15807/jorsj.68.133

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@article{asei2025,
  title        = {{AN ADDITIVE APPROXIMATION SCHEME FOR THE NASH SOCIAL WELFARE MAXIMIZATION WITH IDENTICAL ADDITIVE VALUATIONS}},
  author       = {Asei Inoue & Yusuke Kobayashi},
  journal      = {Journal of the Operations Research Society of Japan},
  year         = {2025},
  doi          = {https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.15807/jorsj.68.133},
}

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