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).
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Archer, A., Papadimitriou, C., Talwar, K., Tardos, E.: An approximate truthful mechanism for combinatorial auctions with single parameter agents. In: Proc. of the 14th SODA (2003)
Archer, A., Tardos, E.: Truthful mechanisms for one-parameter agents. In: Proc. of FOCS 2001, pp. 482–491 (2001)
Auletta, V., De Prisco, R., Penna, P., Persiano, P.: Deterministic truthful approximation mechanisms for scheduling related machines. Technical Report 2, European Project CRESCCO (2003), http://www.dia.unisa.it/~penna/papers/related-MDfull.ps.gz
Clarke, E.H.: Multipart Pricing of Public Goods. Public Choice, pp. 17–33 (1971)
Garey, M.R., Johnson, D.S.: Computers and intractability: a guide to the theory of NP-completeness. Freeman, New York (1979)
Graham, R.L.: Bounds for certain multiprocessing anomalies. Bell System Tech. Journal 45, 1563–1581 (1966)
Groves, T.: Incentive in Teams. Econometrica 41, 617–631 (1973)
Nisan, N., Ronen, A.: Algorithmic Mechanism Design. In: Proc. of the 31st STOC, pp. 129–140 (1999)
Nisan, N., Ronen, A.: Computationally Feasible VCG Mechanisms. In: Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC), pp. 242–252 (2000)
Papadimitriou, C.H.: Algorithms, Games, and the Internet. In: Proc. of the 33rd STOC (2001)
Ronen, A.: Solving Optimization Problems Among Selfish Agents. PhD thesis, Hebrew University in Jerusalem (2000)
Vickrey, W.: Counterspeculation, Auctions and Competitive Sealed Tenders. Journal of Finance, 8–37 (1961)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
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
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24749-4_53
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21236-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24749-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive