Cost Sharing in a Job Scheduling Problem

Abstract:     
A set of jobs need to be served by a server which can serve only one job at a time. Jobs have processing times and incur waiting costs (linear in their waiting time). The jobs share their costs through compensation using monetary transfers. In the first part, we provide an axiomatic characterization of the Shapley value rule by introducing some fairness axioms that are new in the literature. In the second part, we use linear programming duality to provide an alternate characterization of the Shapley value rule. Here, we use the idea of decomposition of transfers and the notion of pairwise no-envy allocation. Of the family of allocation rules that satisfy pairwise no-envy, the Shapley value rule is the one with the minimum sum of absolute values of transfers. We discuss no-envy rules and show that no-envy is not possible in general. If processing times of all jobs are equal, then it is possible to design no-envy rules, and we characterize all no-envy rules for this case.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 35

Keywords: Queueing problems, Shapley value, cost sharing, job scheduling

JEL Classification: C71, D63, C62, D71

working papers series