Race Scheduling Games

Abstract

Job scheduling on parallel machines is a well-studied singleton congestion game. We consider a variant of this game in which the jobs are partitioned into competition sets, and the goal of every player is to minimize the completion time of his job relative to his competitors. Specifically, the primary goal of a player is to minimize the rank of its completion time among his competitors, while minimizing the completion time itself is a secondary objective. This fits environments with strong competition among the participants, in which the relative performance of the players determine their welfare.