Using dual approximation algorithms for scheduling problems theoretical and practical results
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
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
Computationally feasible VCG mechanisms
Proceedings of the 2nd ACM conference on Electronic commerce
STOC '01 Proceedings of the thirty-third annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Tight bounds for worst-case equilibria
SODA '02 Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
The Structure and Complexity of Nash Equilibria for a Selfish Routing Game
ICALP '02 Proceedings of the 29th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming
FOCS '00 Proceedings of the 41st Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Truthful Mechanisms for One-Parameter Agents
FOCS '01 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Designing Networks for Selfish Users is Hard
FOCS '01 Proceedings of the 42nd IEEE symposium on Foundations of Computer Science
Selfish routing with atomic players
SODA '05 Proceedings of the sixteenth annual ACM-SIAM symposium on Discrete algorithms
The effect of collusion in congestion games
Proceedings of the thirty-eighth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Convergence time to Nash equilibria
ICALP'03 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Automata, languages and programming
Nashification and the coordination ratio for a selfish routing game
ICALP'03 Proceedings of the 30th international conference on Automata, languages and programming
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Network games with atomic players
ICALP'06 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Automata, Languages and Programming - Volume Part I
Atomic congestion games among coalitions
ICALP'06 Proceedings of the 33rd international conference on Automata, Languages and Programming - Volume Part I
On designing truthful mechanisms for online scheduling
SIROCCO'05 Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Structural Information and Communication Complexity
The power of verification for one-parameter agents
Journal of Computer and System Sciences
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We consider general resource assignment games involving selfish users/agents in which users compete for resources and try to be assigned to those which maximize their own benefits (e.g., try to route their traffic through links which minimize the latency of their own traffic). We propose and study a mechanism design approach in which an allocation mechanism assigns users to resources and charges the users for using the resources so as to induce each user to truthfully report a private piece of information he/she holds (e.g., how much traffic he/she needs to transmit). This information is crucial for computing optimal (or close to optimal) allocations and an agent could misreport his/her information to induce the underlying allocation algorithm to output a solution which he/she likes more (e.g., which assigns better resources to him/her). For our resource allocation problems, we give an algorithmic characterization of the solutions for which truth-telling is a Nash equilibrium. A natural application of these results is to a scheduling/routing problem which is the mechanism design counterpart of the selfish routing game of Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou [1999]: Each selfish user wants to route a piece of unsplittable traffic using one of m links of different speeds so as to minimize his/her own latency. Our mechanism design counterpart can be seen as the problem of scheduling selfish jobs on parallel related machines and is the dual of the problem of scheduling (unselfish) jobs on parallel selfish machines studied by Archer and Tardos [2001]. Koutsoupias and Papadimitriou studied an “anarchic” scenario in which each user chooses his/her own link, and this may produce Nash equilibria of cost Ω(log m/log log m) times the optimum. Our mechanism design counterpart is a possible way of reducing the effect of selfish behavior via suitable incentives to the agents (i.e., taxes for using the links). We indeed show that in the resulting game, it is possible to guarantee an approximation factor of 8 for any number of links/machines (this solution also works for online settings). However, it remains impossible to guarantee arbitrarily good approximate solutions, even for 2 links/machines and even if the allocation algorithm is allowed superpolynomial time. This result shows that our scheduling problem with selfish jobs is more difficult than the scheduling problem with selfish machines by Archer and Tardos (which admits exact solutions). We also study some generalizations of this basic problem.