A note on improving the search of optimal prices in envy-free perfect matchings
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We present a method for finding envy-free prices in a combinatorial auction where the consumers' number n coincides with that of distinct items for sale, each consumer can buy one single item and each item has only one unit available. This is a particular case of the unit-demand envy-free pricing problem, and was recently revisited by Arbib et al. (2019). These authors proved that using a Fibonacci heap for solving the maximum weight perfect matching and the Bellman-Ford algorithm for getting the envy-free prices, the overall time complexity for solving the problem is O(n^3). We propose a method based on dynamic programming design strategy that seeks the optimal envy-free prices by increasing the consumers' utilities, which has the same cubic complexity time as the aforementioned approach, but whose theoretical and empirical results indicate that our method performs faster than the shortest paths strategy, obtaining an average time reduction in determining optimal envy-free prices of approximately 48%.
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