Improving the efficiency of load balancing games through Taxes

Abstract

In load balancing games, there is a set of available servers and a set of clients; each client wishes to run her job on some server. Clients are selfish and each of them selects a server that, given an assignment of the other clients to servers, minimizes the latency she experiences with no regard to the global optimum. In order to mitigate the effect of selfishness on the efficiency, we assign taxes to the servers. In this way, we obtain a new game where each client aims to minimize the sum of the latency she experiences and the tax she pays. Our objective is to find taxes so that the worst equilibrium of the new game is as efficient as possible. We present new results concerning the impact of taxes on the efficiency of equilibria, with respect to the total latency of all clients and the maximum latency (makespan). © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.