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A Lower Bound of 1+φ for Truthful Scheduling Mechanisms

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Abstract

We study the mechanism design version of the unrelated machines scheduling problem, which is at the core of Algorithmic Game Theory and was first proposed and studied in a seminal paper of Nisan and Ronen. We give an improved lower bound of 1+φ≈2.618 on the approximation ratio of deterministic truthful mechanisms for the makespan. The proof is based on a recursive preprocessing argument which yields a strictly increasing series of new lower bounds for each fixed number of machines n≥4.

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Acknowledgements

Supported in part by IST-15964 (AEOLUS), the project PENED 2003 (co-financed 75% of public expenditure through EC European Social Fund, 25% of public expenditure through Ministry of Development General Secretariat of Research and Technology of Greece and through private sector, under measure 8.3 of Operational Program Competitiveness in the 3rd Community Support Program, and the Greek Ministry of Education (Thales)) and the Vienna Science and Technology Fund WWTF grant ICT10-002.

We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Informatics, University of Athens, Athens, Greece

    Elias Koutsoupias

  2. Theory and Applications of Algorithms Research Group, University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Angelina Vidali

Authors
  1. Elias Koutsoupias
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  2. Angelina Vidali
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Correspondence to Angelina Vidali.

Additional information

Main part of the work of A. Vidali was done at the University of Athens.

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Koutsoupias, E., Vidali, A. A Lower Bound of 1+φ for Truthful Scheduling Mechanisms. Algorithmica 66, 211–223 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-012-9634-6

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