An almost ideal coordination mechanism for unrelated machine scheduling

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new coordination mechanism for unrelated machine scheduling that simplifies implementation and achieves near-optimal efficiency in game-theoretic outcomes, improving upon existing methods.

Contribution

The authors propose a broad class of simple coordination mechanisms and identify one, \\Dcoord, that guarantees near-optimal potential game properties with logarithmic price of anarchy.

Findings

coord mechanism induces potential games with logarithmic price of anarchy.

The mechanism achieves constant price of stability.

Bounds are nearly optimal.

Abstract

Coordination mechanisms aim to mitigate the impact of selfishness when scheduling jobs to different machines. Such a mechanism defines a scheduling policy within each machine and naturally induces a game among the selfish job owners. The desirable properties of a coordination mechanism includes simplicity in its definition and efficiency of the outcomes of the induced game. We present a broad class of coordination mechanisms for unrelated machine scheduling that are simple to define and we identify one of its members (mechanism \Dcoord) that is superior to all known mechanisms. \Dcoord\ induces potential games with logarithmic price of anarchy and only constant price of stability. Both bounds are almost optimal.