Abstract
We consider the problem of scheduling jobs on related machines owned by selfish agents and provide the first deterministic mechanisms with constant approximation that are truthful; that is, truth-telling is a dominant strategy for all agents. More precisely, we present deterministic polynomial-time (2+ε)-approximation algorithms and suitable payment functions that yield truthful mechanisms for several NP-hard restrictions of this problem. Our result also yields a family of deterministic polynomial-time truthful (4+ε)-approximation mechanisms for any fixed number of machines. The only previously-known mechanism for this problem (proposed by Archer and Tardos [FOCS 2001]) is 3-approximated, randomized and truthful under a weaker notion of truthfulness.
Up to our knowledge, our mechanisms are the first non-trivial polynomial-time deterministic truthful mechanisms for this NP-hard problem.
To obtain our results we introduce a technique to transform the PTAS by Graham into a deterministic truthful mechanism.
Work supported by the European Project IST-2001-33135, Critical Resource Sharing for Cooperation in Complex Systems (CRESCCO).
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Auletta, V., De Prisco, R., Penna, P., Persiano, G. (2004). Deterministic Truthful Approximation Mechanisms for Scheduling Related Machines. In: Diekert, V., Habib, M. (eds) STACS 2004. STACS 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2996. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24749-4_53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24749-4_53
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