The Distortion of Distributed Facility Location

We study the distributed facility location problem, where a set of agents with positions on the line of real numbers are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a point to satisfy certain criteria, such as optimize an objective function or avoid strategic behavior. A mechanism in our distributed setting works in two steps: For each district it chooses a point that is representative of the positions reported by the agents in the district, and then decides one of these representative points as the final output. We consider two classes of mechanisms: Unrestricted mechanisms which assume that the agents directly provide their true positions as input, and strategyproof mechanisms which deal with strategic agents and aim to incentivize them to truthfully report their positions. For both classes, we show tight bounds on the best possible approximation in terms of several minimization social objectives, including the well-known average social cost (average total distance of agents from the chosen point) and max cost (maximum distance among all agents from the chosen point), as well as other fairness-inspired objectives that are tailor-made for the distributed setting, in particular, the max-of-average and the average-of-max.