IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/2512.13244.html

Fair Coordination in Strategic Scheduling

Author

Listed:
  • Wei-Chen Lee
  • Martin Bullinger
  • Alessandro Abate
  • Michael Wooldridge

Abstract

We consider a scheduling problem of strategic agents representing jobs of different weights. Each agent has to decide on one of a finite set of identical machines to get their job processed. In contrast to the common and exclusive focus on makespan minimization, we want the outcome to be fair under strategic considerations of the agents. Two natural properties are credibility, which ensures that the assignment is a Nash equilibrium and equality, requiring that agents with equal-weight jobs are assigned to machines of equal load. We combine these two with a hierarchy of fairness properties based on envy-freeness together with several relaxations based on the idea that envy seems more justified towards agents with a higher weight. We present a complete complexity landscape for satisfiability and decision versions of these properties, alone or in combination, and study them as structural constraints under makespan optimization. For our positive results, we develop a unified algorithmic approach, where we achieve different properties by fine-tuning key subroutines.

Suggested Citation

  • Wei-Chen Lee & Martin Bullinger & Alessandro Abate & Michael Wooldridge, 2025. "Fair Coordination in Strategic Scheduling," Papers 2512.13244, arXiv.org.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2512.13244
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.13244
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Milchtaich, Igal, 1996. "Congestion Games with Player-Specific Payoff Functions," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 13(1), pages 111-124, March.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Christian Ewerhart, 2020. "Ordinal potentials in smooth games," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 70(4), pages 1069-1100, November.
    2. Tami Tamir, 2023. "Cost-sharing games in real-time scheduling systems," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 52(1), pages 273-301, March.
    3. Dominique Barth & Benjamin Cohen-Boulakia & Wilfried Ehounou, 2022. "Distributed Reinforcement Learning for the Management of a Smart Grid Interconnecting Independent Prosumers," Energies, MDPI, vol. 15(4), pages 1-19, February.
    4. Le Breton, Michel & Weber, Shlomo, 2009. "Existence of Pure Strategies Nash Equilibria in Social Interaction Games with Dyadic Externalities," CEPR Discussion Papers 7279, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    5. Arnold, Tone & Wooders, Myrna, "undated". "Dynamic Club Formation with Coordination," Economic Research Papers 269414, University of Warwick - Department of Economics.
    6. Ryo Kawasaki & Hideo Konishi & Junki Yukawa, 2023. "Equilibria in bottleneck games," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 52(3), pages 649-685, September.
    7. Hideo Konishi, 2004. "Uniqueness of User Equilibrium in Transportation Networks with Heterogeneous Commuters," Transportation Science, INFORMS, vol. 38(3), pages 315-330, August.
    8. Igal Milchtaich, 2000. "Generic Uniqueness of Equilibrium in Large Crowding Games," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 25(3), pages 349-364, August.
    9. Milchtaich, Igal, 2009. "Weighted congestion games with separable preferences," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 67(2), pages 750-757, November.
    10. Olivier Tercieux & Mark Voorneveld, 2010. "The cutting power of preparation," Mathematical Methods of Operations Research, Springer;Gesellschaft für Operations Research (GOR);Nederlands Genootschap voor Besliskunde (NGB), vol. 71(1), pages 85-101, February.
    11. Le Breton, Michel & Shapoval, Alexander & Weber, Shlomo, 2021. "A game-theoretical model of the landscape theory," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 92(C), pages 41-46.
    12. Bavly, Gilad & Heller, Yuval & Schreiber, Amnon, 2022. "Social welfare in search games with asymmetric information," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 202(C).
    13. Kukushkin, Nikolai S., 2015. "Cournot tatonnement and potentials," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(C), pages 117-127.
    14. Darryl A. Seale & Amnon Rapoport, 2000. "Elicitation of Strategy Profiles in Large Group Coordination Games," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 3(2), pages 153-179, October.
    15. Marianne Guillet & Maximilian Schiffer, 2022. "Coordinating charging request allocation between self-interested navigation service platforms," Papers 2208.09530, arXiv.org.
    16. Zhan Wang & Jinpeng Ma & Hongwei Zhang, 2023. "Stable and envy-free lottery allocations for affordable housing," The Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, Society for the Promotion of Mechanism and Institution Design, University of York, vol. 8(1), pages 1-55, December.
    17. Nikolai S. Kukushkin & Pierre von Mouche, 2018. "Cournot tatonnement and Nash equilibrium in binary status games," Economics Bulletin, AccessEcon, vol. 38(2), pages 1038-1044.
    18. Kukushkin, Nikolai S., 2004. "Best response dynamics in finite games with additive aggregation," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 48(1), pages 94-110, July.
    19. Corine M. Laan & Judith Timmer & Richard J. Boucherie, 2021. "Non-cooperative queueing games on a network of single server queues," Queueing Systems: Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 97(3), pages 279-301, April.
    20. Taiyo Maeda & Shigeru Matsumoto & Tadahiko Murata, 2015. "Agent Heterogeneity and Facility Congestion," Computational Economics, Springer;Society for Computational Economics, vol. 46(2), pages 189-203, August.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arx:papers:2512.13244. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.org/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.