Selfish Multi-User Task Scheduling

In this paper we formulate and study a new scheduling problem called selfish multi-user task scheduling. This problem assumes that there are several users, each of them having multiple tasks that need processing on a set of parallel identical machines. Each user is selfish and her goal is to minimize the makespan of her own tasks. We model this problem as a non-cooperative, extensive-form game. We use the subgame perfect equilibrium solution concept to analyze the game which provides insight into the problem´s properties. We compute the price of anarchy to quantify the costs due to lack of coordination among the users