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.

A complete characterization of group-strategyproof mechanisms of cost-sharing. Emmanouil Pountourakis and Angelina Vidali, (18th Annual European Symposium on Algorithms) ESA'10.

ESA'10.

Invited to the Algorithmica special issue for ESA



We study the problem of designing group-strategyproof cost-sharing mechanisms. The players report their bids for getting serviced and the mechanism decides which players are going to be serviced and how much each one of them is going to pay. We determine three conditions: Fence Monotonicity, Stability of the allocation and Validity of the tie-breaking rule that are necessary and sufficient for group-strategyproofness, regardless of the cost function. Fence Monotonicity puts restrictions only on the payments of the mechanism and stability only on the allocation.