A Characterization of n-Player Strongly Monotone Scheduling Mechanisms / 568
Annamaria Kovacs, Angelina Vidali
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Our work deals with the important problem of globally characterizing truthful mechanisms where players have multi-parameter, additive valuations, like scheduling unrelated machines or additive combinatorial auctions. Very few mechanisms are known for these settings and the question is: Can we prove that no other truthful mechanisms exist? We characterize truthful mechanisms for n players and 2 tasks or items, as either task-independent, or a player-grouping minimizer, a new class of mechanisms we discover, which generalizes affine minimizers. We assume decisiveness, strong monotonicity and that the truthful payments (The (normalized) payments are uniquely determined by the allocation function of the mechanism; thus the assumptions concern properties of the allocation.) are continuous functions of players' bids.