Deterministic Truthful Approximation Mechanisms for Scheduling Related Machines

We consider the problem of scheduling jobs on related machines owned by selfish agents and provide the first deterministic mechanisms with constant approximation that are truthful; that is, truth-telling is a dominant strategy for all agents. More precisely, we present deterministic polynomial-time (2+ε)-approximation algorithms and suitable payment functions that yield truthful mechanisms for several NP-hard restrictions of this problem. Our result also yields a family of deterministic polynomial-time truthful (4+ε)-approximation mechanisms for any fixed number of machines. The only previously-known mechanism for this problem (proposed by Archer and Tardos [FOCS 2001]) is 3-approximated, randomized and truthful under a weaker notion of truthfulness. Up to our knowledge, our mechanisms are the first non-trivial polynomial-time deterministic truthful mechanisms for this NP-hard problem. To obtain our results we introduce a technique to transform the PTAS by Graham into a deterministic truthful mechanism.