Polyhedral Methods for Cooperative Games: Small Lifts and Hard Faces

Source abstract

We study the computational complexity of fundamental algorithmic problems -- membership testing, separation, valid-inequality testing, and linear optimization -- over polytopes and cones arising from cooperative games (also known as pseudo-Boolean functions). A central obstacle in the study of such problems is that a general cooperative game on $n$ players requires $2^n$ values, so the input size is $2^n$ for a game with $n$ players, making these computational tasks theoretically trivial. Restricting to $k$-additive games reduces the input size to $O(n^k)$, making such games a natural target for meaningful questions about the existence of efficient algorithms. On the positive side, we give an explicit extended formulation of size $O(n^k)$ for the core of $k$-additive $k$-monotone games, allowing all four problems to be solved by a single polynomial-size linear program -- in particular, circumventing the ellipsoid method that is needed when building from earlier tractability results of Deng and Papadimitriou, or of Edmonds. For the cone of $k$-additive $(k{-}1)$-monotone games, we give a complete characterization of its extreme rays and derive the same $O(n^k)$ bound on extension complexity, yielding a geometry-based proof and generalization of a result of Billionnet and Minoux. On the negative side, we show that for $l \leq k-2$ the cone of $k$-additive $l$-monotone games is computationally intractable: membership testing is not in NP (unless NP\,=\,coNP), valid-inequality testing is NP-complete, and extension complexity is at least $1.5^n$. Our hardness results yield, as a special case, a result of Crama and of Gallo and Simone. Furthermore, our hardness results also explain the lack of any good characterization of the extreme rays of the cone of $k$-additive $(k{-}2)$-monotone games.