Algorithmic mechanism design (extended abstract)
STOC '99 Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Truthful Mechanisms for One-Parameter Agents
FOCS '01 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Truthful approximation mechanisms for scheduling selfish related machines
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Deterministic monotone algorithms for scheduling on related machines
WAOA'04 Proceedings of the Second international conference on Approximation and Online Algorithms
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Non-preemptive Coordination Mechanisms for Identical Machine Scheduling Games
SIROCCO '08 Proceedings of the 15th international colloquium on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
Theoretical Computer Science
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Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing
Scheduling selfish tasks: about the performance of truthful algorithms
COCOON'07 Proceedings of the 13th annual international conference on Computing and Combinatorics
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We consider the problem of designing truthful mechanisms for scheduling selfish tasks (or agents)–whose objective is the minimization of their completion times– on parallel identical machines in order to minimize the makespan. A truthful mechanism can be easily obtained in this context (if we, of course, assume that the tasks cannot shrink their lengths) by scheduling the tasks following the increasing order of their lengths. The quality of a mechanism is measured by its approximation factor (price of anarchy, in a distributed system) w.r.t. the social optimum. The previous mechanism, known as SPT, produces a (2–1/m)-approximate schedule, where m is the number of machines. The central question in this paper is the following: “Are there other truthful mechanisms with better approximation guarantee (price of anarchy) for the considered scheduling problem?” This question has been raised by Christodoulou et al [1] in the context of coordination mechanisms, but it is also relevant in centrally controlled systems. We present (randomized) truthful mechanisms for both the centralized and the distributed settings that improve the (expected) approximation guarantee (price of anarchy) of the SPT mechanism. Our centralized mechanism holds for any number of machines and arbitrary schedule lengths, while the coordination mechanism holds only for two machines and schedule lengths that are powers of a certain constant.