Scheduling Selfish Tasks: About the Performance of Truthful Algorithms

This paper deals with problems which fall into the domain of selfish scheduling: a protocol is in charge of building a schedule for a set of tasks without directly knowing their length. The protocol gets these informations from agents who control the tasks. The aim of each agent is to minimize the completion time of her task while the protocol tries to minimize the maximal completion time. When an agent reports the length of her task, she is aware of what the others bid and also of the protocol's algorithm. Then, an agent can bid a false value in order to optimize her individual objective function. With erroneous information, even the most efficient algorithm may produce unreasonable solutions. An algorithm is truthful if it prevents the selfish agents from lying about the length of their task. The central question in this paper is: "How efficient a truthful algorithm can be? We study the problem of scheduling selfish tasks on parallel identical machines. This question has b...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: COCOON
• Authors: George Christodoulou, Laurent Gourvès, Fanny Pascual
• Keywords: COCOON 2007, Combinatorics, Completion Time, Maximal Completion Time, Selfish