*Result*: A New Lower Bound for Deterministic Truthful Scheduling.

*We study the problem of truthfully scheduling m tasks to n selfish unrelated machines, under the objective of makespan minimization, as was introduced in the seminal work of Nisan and Ronen (in: The 31st Annual ACM symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC), 1999). Closing the current gap of [2.618, n] on the approximation ratio of deterministic truthful mechanisms is a notorious open problem in the field of algorithmic mechanism design. We provide the first such improvement in more than a decade, since the lower bounds of 2.414 (for n = 3 ) and 2.618 (for n → ∞ ) by Christodoulou et al. (in: Proceedings of the 18th Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms (SODA), 2007) and Koutsoupias and Vidali (in: Proceedings of Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science (MFCS), 2007), respectively. More specifically, we show that the currently best lower bound of 2.618 can be achieved even for just n = 4 machines; for n = 5 we already get the first improvement, namely 2.711; and allowing the number of machines to grow arbitrarily large we can get a lower bound of 2.755. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Algorithmica is the property of Springer Nature and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)*