A continuous knapsack problem with separable convex utilities: Approximation algorithms and applications

We study a continuous knapsack problem with separable convex utilities. We show that the problem is NP-hard, and provide two simple algorithms that have worst-case performance guarantees. We consider as an application a novel subsidy allocation problem in the presence of market competition, subject to a budget constraint and upper bounds on the amount allocated to each firm, where the objective is to minimize the market price of a good.