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The VCG mechanism for Bayesian scheduling

Abstract:
We study the problem of scheduling m tasks to n selfish, unrelated machines in order to minimize the makespan, where the execution times are independent random variables, identical across machines. We show that the VCG mechanism, which myopically allocates each task to its best machine, achieves an approximation ratio of O(ln n/ln ln n). This improves significantly on the previously best known bound of O (m/n) for prior-independent mechanisms, give by Chawla et al. [STOC'13] under the additional assumption of Monotone Hazard Rate (MHR) distributions. Although we demonstrate that this is in general tight, if we do maintain the MHR assumption, then we get improved, (small) constant bounds for m ≥ n ln n i.i.d. tasks, while we also identify a sufficient condition on the distribution that yields a constant approximation ratio regardless of the number of tasks.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

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Publisher copy:
10.1145/3105968

Authors


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Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Computer Science
Role:
Author


Publisher:
Association for Computing Machinery
Journal:
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation More from this journal
Volume:
5
Issue:
4
Pages:
19
Publication date:
2017-12-01
Acceptance date:
2017-03-21
DOI:
ISSN:
2167-8375 and 2167-8383


Pubs id:
pubs:687157
UUID:
uuid:f0b283b1-dc61-40f8-83b6-5eabab91c4ca
Local pid:
pubs:687157
Source identifiers:
687157
Deposit date:
2017-03-25

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