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On the Price of Anarchy of Cost-Sharing in Real-Time Scheduling Systems

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Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2019)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11920))

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Abstract

We study cost-sharing games in real-time scheduling systems where the operation cost of the server at any given time is a function of its load. We focus on monomial cost functions and consider both the case when the degree is less than one (inducing positive externalities for the jobs) and when it is greater than one (inducing negative externalities for the jobs). For the former case, we provide tight price of anarchy bounds which show that the price of anarchy grows to infinity as a polynomial of the number of jobs in the game. For the latter, we observe that existing results provide constant and tight (asymptotically in the degree of the monomial) bounds on the price of anarchy. We then switch our attention to improving the price of anarchy by means of a simple coordination mechanism that has no knowledge of the instance. We show that our mechanism reduces the price of anarchy of games with n jobs and unit server costs from \(\varTheta (\sqrt{n})\) to 2. We also show that for a restricted class of instances a similar improvement is achieved for monomial server costs. This is not the case, however, for unrestricted instances of monomial costs for which we prove that the price of anarchy remains super-constant for our mechanism.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Eirini Georgoulaki

  2. Google Research, Mountain View, USA

    Kostas Kollias

Authors
  1. Eirini Georgoulaki
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  2. Kostas Kollias
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Correspondence to Kostas Kollias .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Patras, Rio, Greece

    Ioannis Caragiannis

  2. Google Research New York, New York, NY, USA

    Vahab Mirrokni

  3. The University of Texas System, Austin, TX, USA

    Evdokia Nikolova

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Georgoulaki, E., Kollias, K. (2019). On the Price of Anarchy of Cost-Sharing in Real-Time Scheduling Systems. In: Caragiannis, I., Mirrokni, V., Nikolova, E. (eds) Web and Internet Economics. WINE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11920. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35389-6_15

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35389-6_15

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-35388-9

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-35389-6

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