Facility Location with Variable and Dynamic Populations

Abstract

Facility location is a well-studied problem in social choice literature, where agents' preferences are restricted to be single-peaked. When the number of agents is treated as a variable (e.g., not observable a priori), a social choice function must be defined so that it can accept any possible number of preferences as input. Furthermore, there exist cases where multiple choices must be made continuously while agents dynamically arrive/leave. Under such variable and dynamic populations, a social choice function needs to give each agent an incentive to sincerely report her existence. In this paper we investigate facility location models with variable and dynamic populations. For a static, i.e., one-shot, variable population model, we provide a necessary and sufficient condition for a social choice function to satisfy participation, as well as truthfulness, anonymity, and Pareto efficiency. The condition is given as a further restriction on the well-known median voter schemes. For a dynamic model, we first propose an online social choice function, which is optimal for the total sum of the distances between the choices in the previous and current periods, among any Pareto efficient functions. We then define a generalized class of online social choice functions and compare their performances both theoretically and experimentally.