Efficient Coordination Mechanisms for Unrelated Machine Scheduling

We present three new coordination mechanisms for scheduling n selfish jobs on m unrelated machines. A coordination mechanism aims to mitigate the impact of selfishness of jobs on the efficiency of schedules by defining a local scheduling policy on each machine. The scheduling policies induce a game among the jobs and each job prefers to be scheduled on a machine so that its completion time is minimum given the assignments of the other jobs. We consider the maximum completion time among all jobs as the measure of the efficiency of schedules. The approximation ratio of a coordination mechanism quantifies the efficiency of pure Nash equilibria (price of anarchy) of the induced game.