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An Almost Ideal Coordination Mechanism for Unrelated Machine Scheduling

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Abstract

Coordination mechanisms aim to mitigate the impact of selfishness when scheduling jobs to different machines. Such a mechanism defines a scheduling policy within each machine and naturally induces a game among the selfish job owners. The desirable properties of a coordination mechanism includes simplicity in its definition and efficiency of the outcomes of the induced game. We present a broad class of coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling that are simple to define and we identify one of its members (mechanism DCOORD) that is superior to all known mechanisms. In particular, DCOORD induces potential games with logarithmic price of anarchy and only constant price of stability. Both bounds are almost optimal.

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Notes

  1. Even though their mechanism Balance heavily uses job IDs, Cohen et al. [10] claim that it is anonymous. This is certainly false according to our terminology since anonymity imposes that two jobs with identical load vectors should be indistinguishable.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by Caratheodory grant E.114 from the University of Patras and by project ANR-14-CE24-0007-01 “CoCoRICo-CoDec” . Part of the work was done while the second author was visiting the Institute for Mathematical Sciences, National University of Singapore in 2015.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics, University of Patras, 26504, Rion-Patras, Greece

    Ioannis Caragiannis

  2. CNRS (UMR-6211), Université de Caen Basse-Normandie, Caen, France

    Angelo Fanelli

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  1. Ioannis Caragiannis
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  2. Angelo Fanelli
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Correspondence to Ioannis Caragiannis.

Additional information

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Special Issue on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT 2016)

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT ’16).

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Caragiannis, I., Fanelli, A. An Almost Ideal Coordination Mechanism for Unrelated Machine Scheduling. Theory Comput Syst 63, 114–127 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-018-9857-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00224-018-9857-2

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