The stackelberg minimum spanning tree game on planar and bounded-treewidth graphs

Abstract

The Stackelberg Minimum Spanning Tree Game is a two-level combinatorial pricing problem introduced at WADS’07. The game is played on a graph, whose edges are colored either red or blue, and where the red edges have a given fixed cost. The first player chooses an assignment of prices to the blue edges, and the second player then buys the cheapest spanning tree, using any combination of red and blue edges. The goal of the first player is to maximize the total price of purchased blue edges. We study this problem in the cases of planar and bounded-treewidth graphs. We show that the problem is NP-hard on planar graphs but can be solved in polynomial time on graphs of bounded treewidth.