New efficiency results for makespan cost sharing

In the context of scheduling, we study social cost efficiency for a cost-sharing problem in which the service provider's cost is determined by the makespan of the served agents' jobs. For identical machines, we give surprisingly simple cross-monotonic cost-sharing methods that achieve the essentially best efficiency Moulin mechanisms can guarantee. Still, our methods match the budget-balance of previous (yet rather intricate) results. Subsequently, we give a generalization for arbitrary jobs. Finally, we return to identical jobs in order to perform a fine-grained analysis. We show that the universal worst-case efficiency bounds from [8] are overly pessimistic. Key words: Scheduling, Mechanism Design, Cost-Sharing, Cross-Monotonicity

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: IPL
• Authors: Yvonne Bleischwitz, Florian Schoppmann
• Keywords: Cost-sharing Problem, Cross-monotonic Cost-sharing Methods, IPL 2008, Social Cost Efficiency