Selfish jobs with favorite machines: Price of anarchy vs. strong price of anarchy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

We consider the well-studied game-theoretic version of machine scheduling in which jobs correspond to self-interested users and machines correspond to resources. Here each user chooses a machine trying to minimize her own cost, and such selfish behavior typically results in some equilibrium which is not globally optimal: An equilibrium is an allocation where no user can reduce her own cost by moving to another machine, which in general need not minimize the makespan, i.e., the maximum load over the machines. We provide tight bounds on two well-studied notions in algorithmic game theory, namely, the price of anarchy and the strong price of anarchy on machine scheduling setting which lies in between the related and the unrelated machine case. Both notions study the social cost (makespan) of the worst equilibrium compared to the optimum, with the strong price of anarchy restricting to a stronger form of equilibria. Our results extend a prior study comparing the price of anarchy to the strong price of anarchy for two related machines (Epstein [13], Acta Informatica 2010), thus providing further insights on the relation between these concepts. Our exact bounds give a qualitative and quantitative comparison between the two models. The bounds also show that the setting is indeed easier than the two unrelated machines: In the latter, the strong price of anarchy is 2, while in ours it is strictly smaller.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCombinatorial Optimization and Applications - 11th International Conference, COCOA 2017, Proceedings
EditorsXiaofeng Gao, Hongwei Du, Meng Han
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages226-240
Number of pages15
ISBN (Print)9783319711461
DOIs
StatePublished - 2017
Event11th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2017 - Shanghai, China
Duration: 16 Dec 201718 Dec 2017

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume10628 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference11th International Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications, COCOA 2017
Country/TerritoryChina
CityShanghai
Period16/12/1718/12/17

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