Jeffrey K. MacKie-Mason

Some Economics of Market-Based Distributed Scheduling

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Authors

MacKie-Mason, Jeffrey K. Walsh, William E. Wellman, Michael P. Wurman, Peter

Publication date

May, 1998

Abstract

Market mechanisms solve distributed scheduling problems by allocating the scheduled resources according to market prices. We model distributed scheduling as a discrete resource allocation problem, and demonstrate the applicability of economic analysis to this framework. Drawing on results from the literature, we discuss the existence of equilibrium prices for some general classes of scheduling problems, and the quality of equilibrium solutions. We then present two protocols for implementing market solutions, and analyze their computational and economic properties.

Citation

The 18th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS'98), May 1998.