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On 2-Player Randomized Mechanisms for Scheduling

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Internet and Network Economics (WINE 2009)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5929))

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Abstract

In this paper, we study randomized truthful mechanisms for scheduling unrelated machines. We focus on the case of scheduling two machines, which is also the focus of many previous works [12,13,6,4]. For this problem, [13] gave the current best mechanism with an approximation ratio of 1.5963 and [14] proved a lower bound of 1.5. In this work, we introduce a natural technical assumption called scale-free, which says that the allocation will not change if the instance is scaled by a global factor. Under this assumption, we prove a better lower bound of \(\frac{25}{16}\)(= 1.5625). We then study a further special case, namely scheduling two tasks on two machines. For this setting, we provide a correlation mechanism which has an approximation ratio of 1.5089. We also prove a lower bound of 1.506 for all the randomized scale-free truthful mechanisms in this setting.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Microsoft Research Asia,  

    Pinyan Lu

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  1. Pinyan Lu
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Systems, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Ariosto 25, 00185, Roma, Italy

    Stefano Leonardi

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Lu, P. (2009). On 2-Player Randomized Mechanisms for Scheduling. In: Leonardi, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2009. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5929. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-10841-9_5

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-10840-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-10841-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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