Fair Coordination in Strategic Scheduling

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Wei-Chen, Bullinger, Martin, Abate, Alessandro, Wooldridge, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Wei-Chen
Bullinger, Martin
Abate, Alessandro
Wooldridge, Michael
author_facet Lee, Wei-Chen
Bullinger, Martin
Abate, Alessandro
Wooldridge, Michael
contents 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.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_13244
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Fair Coordination in Strategic Scheduling
Lee, Wei-Chen
Bullinger, Martin
Abate, Alessandro
Wooldridge, Michael
Computer Science and Game Theory
Computational Complexity
Multiagent Systems
Theoretical Economics
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.
title Fair Coordination in Strategic Scheduling
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Computational Complexity
Multiagent Systems
Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.13244