On-line routing of virtual circuits with applications to load balancing and machine scheduling
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Algorithmic mechanism design (extended abstract)
STOC '99 Proceedings of the thirty-first annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Developments from a June 1996 seminar on Online algorithms: the state of the art
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
STACS'05 Proceedings of the 22nd annual conference on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science
Truthful algorithms for scheduling selfish tasks on parallel machines
Theoretical Computer Science
Routing selfish unsplittable traffic
ACM Transactions on Algorithms (TALG)
Fast payment schemes for truthful mechanisms with verification
Theoretical Computer Science
Approximation and Online Algorithms
New constructions of mechanisms with verification
ICALP'06 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Automata, Languages and Programming - Volume Part I
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We study the online version of the scheduling problem involving selfish agents considered by Archer and Tardos [FOCS 2001]: jobs must be scheduled on m parallel related machines, each of them owned by a different selfish agent. Our study focuses on general techniques to translate approximation/competitive algorithms into equivalent approximation/competitive truthful mechanisms. Our results show that this translation is more problematic in the online setting than in the offline one.For m = 2, we develop an offline and an online “translation” technique which, given anyρ-approximation/competitive (polynomial-time) algorithm, yields an f(ρ)-approximation/competitive (polynomial-time) mechanism, with f(ρ) = ρ(1 + ε) in the offline case, for every ε 0. By contrast, one of our lower bounds implies that, in general, online ρ-competitive algorithms cannot be turned into ρ(1 + ε)-competitive mechanisms, for some ε 0 and every m ≥ 2. We also investigate the issue of designing new online algorithms from scratch so to obtain efficient competitive mechanisms, and prove some lower bounds on a class of “natural” algorithms. Finally, we consider the variant introduced by Nisan and Ronen [STOC 1999] in which machines can be verified. For this model, we give a O(1)-competitive online mechanism for any number of machines and prove that some of the above lower bounds can be broken.