An Almost Ideal Coordination Mechanism for Unrelated Machine Scheduling

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.