The Submodular Santa Claus Problem in the Restricted Assignment Case
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The submodular Santa Claus problem was introduced in a seminal work by Goemans, Harvey, Iwata, and Mirrokni (SODA'09) as an application of their structural result. In the mentioned problem n unsplittable resources have to be assigned to m players, each with a monotone submodular utility function f_i. The goal is to maximize min_i f_i(S_i) where S_1,…,S_m is a partition of the resources. The result by Goemans et al. implies a polynomial time O(n^1/2 +ε)-approximation algorithm. Since then progress on this problem was limited to the linear case, that is, all f_i are linear functions. In particular, a line of research has shown that there is a polynomial time constant approximation algorithm for linear valuation functions in the restricted assignment case. This is the special case where each player is given a set of desired resources Γ_i and the individual valuation functions are defined as f_i(S) = f(S ∩Γ_i) for a global linear function f. This can also be interpreted as maximizing min_i f(S_i) with additional assignment restrictions, i.e., resources can only be assigned to certain players. In this paper we make comparable progress for the submodular variant. Namely, if f is a monotone submodular function, we can in polynomial time compute an O(loglog(n))-approximate solution.
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