Traveling salesman games with the Monge property Original Research Article

Several works have indicated the relationships between polynomially solvable combinatorial optimization problems and the core non-emptiness of cooperative games associated with them, and between intractable combinatorial optimization problems and the hardness of the problem to decide the core non-emptiness of the associated games. In this paper, we study the core of a traveling salesman game, which is associated with the traveling salesman problem. First, we show that in general the problem to test the core non-emptiness of a given traveling salesman game is NP-hard. This corresponds to the NP-hardness of the traveling salesman problem. Second, we show that the core of a traveling salesman game is non-empty if the distance matrix is a symmetric Monge matrix, and also that a traveling salesman game is submodular (or concave) if the distance matrix is a Kalmanson matrix. These correspond to the fact that the Monge property and the Kalmanson property are polynomially solvable special cases of the traveling salesman problem.