Group activity selection on social networks

We propose a new variant of the group activity selection problem (GASP), where the agents are placed on a social network and activities can only be assigned to connected subgroups. We show that if multiple groups can simultaneously engage in the same activity, finding a stable outcome is easy as lon...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Igarashi, A, Peters, D, Elkind, E
Format: Journal article
Published: Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence 2017
Description
Summary:We propose a new variant of the group activity selection problem (GASP), where the agents are placed on a social network and activities can only be assigned to connected subgroups. We show that if multiple groups can simultaneously engage in the same activity, finding a stable outcome is easy as long as the network is acyclic. In contrast, if each activity can be assigned to a single group only, finding stable outcomes becomes intractable, even if the underlying network is very simple: the problem of determining whether a given instance of a GASP admits a Nash stable outcome turns out to be NP-hard when the social network is a path, a star, or if the size of each connected component is bounded by a constant. On the other hand, we obtain fixed-parameter tractability results for this problem with respect to the number of activities.