Equilibria for two parallel links: The strong price of anarchy versus the price of anarchy

Following recent interest in the strong price of anarchy (SPOA), we consider this measure, as well as the well known price of anarchy (POA) for the job scheduling problem on two uniformly related parallel machines (or links). The atomic players are the jobs, and the delay of a job is the completion time of the machine running it. The social goal is to minimize the maximum delay of any job. Thus the cost (or social cost) in this case is the makespan of the schedule. The selfish goal of each job is to minimize its delay, i.e., the delay of the machine that it chooses to run on. A pure Nash equilibrium is a schedule where no job can obtain a smaller delay by selfishly moving to a different configuration (machine), while other jobs remain in their original positions. A strong equilibrium is a schedule where no (non-empty) subset of jobs exists, where all jobs in this subset can benefit from changing their configuration. We say that all jobs in a subset benefit from moving to a diffe...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: DAGSTUHL
• Authors: Leah Epstein
• Keywords: DAGSTUHL 2007, Smaller Delay, Social Cost, Software Engineering, Strong Equilibrium