Scheduling with opting out: improving upon random priority

Crès, H. and Moulin, H. (2001) Scheduling with opting out: improving upon random priority. Operations Research, 49(4), pp. 565-577.

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Publisher's URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3088587

Abstract

In a scheduling problem where agents can opt out, we show that the familiar Random Priority (RP) a rule can be improved upon by another mechanism dubbed Probabilistic Serial (PS). Both mechanisms are nonmanipulable in a strong sense, but the latter is Pareto superior to the former and serves a larger (expected number of agents. The PS equilibrium outcome is easier to compute than the RP outcome; on the other hand RP is easier to implement than PS. We show that the improvement of PS over RP is significant but small: at most a couple of percentage points in the relative welfare gain and the relative difference in quantity served. We conjecture that the latter never exceeds 8.33 %. Both gains vanish when the number of agents is large.

Item Type:Articles
Status:Published
Refereed:Yes
Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID:Moulin, Professor Herve
Authors: Crès, H., and Moulin, H.
College/School:College of Social Sciences > Adam Smith Business School > Economics
Journal Name:Operations Research
ISSN:0030-364X
ISSN (Online):1526-5463

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