Information Extraction in Scheduling Problems with Non-Identical Machines

In this paper we study the problem of scheduling a set of jobs through a set of machines where the processing speed of the machines can differ. We assume that the waiting cost of each job is private information and that all jobs take identical processing time in any given machine. By allowing for monetary transfer, we identify the complete class of multiple non-identical machine scheduling problems for which we can find information revelation mechanisms that lead to (a) minimization of aggregate cost (or efficiency) and (b) costless information extraction.

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