Cole, Richard, Correa, Jose, Gkatzelis, Vasillis, Mirrokni, Vahab and Olver, Neil 
ORCID: 0000-0001-8897-5459
(2011)
Decentralized utilitarian mechanisms for scheduling games.
In: 43rd ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, 2011-06-06 - 2011-06-08, San Jose, California, San Jose, United States, USA.
Abstract
Game Theory and Mechanism Design are by now standard tools for studying and designing massive decentralized systems. Unfortunately, designing mechanisms that induce socially efficient outcomes often requires full information and prohibitively large computational resources. In this work we study simple mechanisms that require only local information. Specifically, in the setting of a classic scheduling problem, we demonstrate local mechanisms that induce outcomes with social cost close to that of the socially optimal solution. Somewhat counter-intuitively, we find that mechanisms yielding Pareto dominated outcomes may in fact enhance the overall performance of the system, and we provide a justification of these results by interpreting these inefficiencies as externalities being internalized. We also show how to employ randomization to obtain yet further improvements. Lastly, we use the game-theoretic insights gained to obtain a new combinatorial approximation algorithm for the underlying optimization problem.
| Item Type: | Conference or Workshop Item (Paper) |
|---|---|
| Official URL: | http://acm-stoc.org/stoc2011/ |
| Additional Information: | © 2011 The Author(s) |
| Divisions: | Mathematics |
| Subjects: | Q Science > QA Mathematics |
| JEL classification: | C - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods > C7 - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory > C72 - Noncooperative Games D - Microeconomics > D7 - Analysis of Collective Decision-Making > D71 - Social Choice; Clubs; Committees; Associations D - Microeconomics > D8 - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty > D81 - Criteria for Decision-Making under Risk and Uncertainty |
| Date Deposited: | 24 Jan 2020 11:42 |
| Last Modified: | 01 Oct 2024 04:02 |
| URI: | http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/103172 |
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
