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From packing rules to cost-sharing mechanisms

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Abstract

Bin packing is one of the most fundamental problems in resource allocation. Most research on the classical bin packing problem has focused on the design and analysis of centralized packing rules. However, such rules are often infeasible to implement in distributed and decentralized environments, for the sake of both unavailability of global information and incentive compatibility. In this paper, we revisit the cost-sharing mechanisms for selfish bin packing (SBP) in decentralized environments. We first propose a simple and intuitive mechanism with \(PoA=1.5\). We then show that for a large class of mechanisms for the SBP, 1.5 is actually a lower bound of PoA. Based on this, we propose new rules for the SBP and design a new mechanism with \(PoA \le 22/15\approx 1.467\).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the two anonymous referees for their carefully reading and valuable comments that greatly help improve the presentation of this paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Northwestern University, Evanston, USA

    Chenhao Zhang

  2. Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Guochuan Zhang

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  1. Chenhao Zhang
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  2. Guochuan Zhang
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Correspondence to Guochuan Zhang.

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Dedicated to Professor Minyi Yue’s 100th birthday.

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Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in COCOA 2017, which got the best paper award.

Chenhao Zhang: This work was done while the first author was a student of Zhejiang University.

Guochuan Zhang: Research is partly supported by NSFC (11531014, 11771365).

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Zhang, C., Zhang, G. From packing rules to cost-sharing mechanisms. J Comb Optim 44, 1578–1593 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-019-00519-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-019-00519-6

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