Envy-free makespan approximation

Edith Cohen, Michal Feldman, Amos Fiat, Haim Kaplan, Svetlana Olonetsky
2010 Proceedings of the 11th ACM conference on Electronic commerce - EC '10  
We study envy-free mechanisms for assigning tasks to agents, where every task may take a different amount of time to perform by each agent, and the goal is to get all the tasks done as soon as possible (i.e., minimize the makespan). For indivisible tasks, we put forward an envy-free polynomial mechanism that approximates the minimal makespan to within a factor of O(log m), where m is the number of machines. This bound is almost tight, as we also show that no envy-free mechanism can achieve a
more » ... ter bound than Ω(log m/ log log m). This improves the recent result of Mu'alem [24] who introduced the model and gave an upper bound of (m+1)/2, and a lower bound of 2−1/m. For divisible tasks, we show that there always exists an envy-free poly-time mechanism with optimal makespan. Finally, we demonstrate how our mechanism for envy free makespan minimization can be interpreted as a market clearing problem.
doi:10.1145/1807342.1807368 dblp:conf/sigecom/CohenFFKO10 fatcat:3sichpvspjcapbrpbtafxv3bce