2009/10/01 by Patrick Briest, Sanjeev Khanna, Briest, Patrick +1
Computer Science · #Computational Complexity (cs.CC) #Data Structures and Algorithms (cs.DS) #F.2.2 #FOS: Computer and information sciences #cs.CC #cs.DS
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0910.0110
arxiv created 2009/10/01 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We consider the Stackelberg shortest-path pricing problem, which is defined as follows. Given a graph G with fixed-cost and pricable edges and two distinct vertices s and t, we may assign prices to the pricable edges. Based on the predefined fixed costs and our prices, a customer purchases a cheapest s-t-path in G and we receive payment equal to the sum of prices of pricable edges belonging to the path. Our goal is to find prices maximizing the payment received from the customer. While Stackelberg shortest-path pricing was known to be APX-hard before, we provide the first explicit approximation threshold and prove hardness of approximation within 2-o(1).