Two-Sided Facility Location Games

Facility location problems have been studied in settings like hospital placement or the competition between stores. In some cases, a central authority coordinates facility placements to optimize metrics like the coverage of an area or emergency response time. In many cases, however, facilities are placed by multiple rational agents to maximize their utility, e.g., the number of clients they attract. In previous research, these games feature simplistic client behavior independent of other clients' strategic choices, e.g., visiting the closest facility. Our goal is to understand what happens if clients also act selfishly, resulting in a two-stage game consisting of strategic facility and client agents. In three recent publications, we investigated such two-stage models for clients that optimize their waiting times. We showed the existence and gave algorithms for (approximate) subgame perfect equilibria, a common extension of Nash equilibria for sequential games. To learn more about this domain, we intend to investigate further natural client behaviors and eventually create a more general model or hierarchy of two-sided facility location games. With this, we aim to make predictions in real-world settings, e.g., the placement of renewable energy infrastructure.