A characterization of 2-player mechanisms for scheduling. George Christodoulou, Elias Koutsoupias and Angelina Vidali, 16th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms (ESA'08).
George Christodoulou, Elias Koutsoupias and Angelina Vidali, ESA '08
[ArXiv]
We study the mechanism design problem of scheduling unrelated machines and we completely characterize the decisive truthful mechanisms for two players when the domain contains both positive and negative values. We show that the class of truthful mechanisms is very limited: A decisive truthful mechanism partitions the tasks into groups so that the tasks in each group are allocated independently of the other groups. Tasks in a group of size at least two are allocated by an affine minimizer and tasks in singleton groups by a threshold mechanism.