An Improved Randomized Truthful Mechanism for Scheduling Unrelated Machines

Abstract

We study the scheduling problem on unrelated machines in the mechanism design setting. This problem was proposed and studied in the seminal paper (Nisan and Ronen 1999), where they gave a 1.75-approximation randomized truthful mechanism for the case of two machines. We improve this result by a 1.6737-approximation randomized truthful mechanism. We also generalize our result to a $0.8368m$-approximation mechanism for task scheduling with $m$ machines, which improve the previous best upper bound of $0.875m(Mu'alem and Schapira 2007).