Utilitarian resource assignment (Q866544)

The paper deals with the optimal resource allocation. Ther is a finite number of tasks and finite number of resources. To every task there should be assigned a resource. The authors investigate this problem from a game-theoretic point of view. Tasks are considered as agents, choice of a resource as a strategy. Instead of payoffs there are costs of assignments. The individual cost due to a task (agent) depends on the type of the resource, the size of a task and the sizes of all other tasks assigned to the same resource. The authors study the Nash equilibria for the individual costs. Their main goal is to estimate the ratio of the global cost (i.e. the sum of all individual costs) of such a Nash equilibrium and the minimal global cost.