The Impact of Outliers on Strategic Facility Location

Speaker(s)

Artem Tsikiridis

Affiliation

University of Warsaw

Language of the talk

English

Date

Nov. 5, 2026, noon

Information about the event

seminar online

Seminar

Seminar Algorithmic Economics

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We study facility location problems with n strategic agents in the presence of outliers, where the mechanism may exclude z agents from the social cost. Discarding outliers is particularly meaningful when some agents have extreme or atypical preferences, as it prevents the z outliers from dominating the outcome and the social cost. We provide an analysis of the impact of outliers in mechanism design under both the utilitarian and egalitarian social cost objectives. While it may seem intuitive that ignoring outliers can only improve a mechanism's efficiency, our results reveal that the opposite can occur. On the other hand, access to predictions allows us to mitigate this inefficiency for the utilitarian objective and design mechanisms achieving the best-possible trade-off between consistency and robustness.

Joint work with: Argyris Deligkas (Royal Holloway University of London), Eduard Eiben (Royal Holloway University of London), Sophie Klumper (CWI), and Guido Schaefer (CWI and University of Amsterdam)

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09561

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