The VCG mechanism has some nice properties if the agents-are-substitutes property holds.For example, for combinatorial auctions the property assures that the VCG mechanism is supported by a pricing equilibrium. The existence of such a pricing equilibrium is a necessary condition for the...

Increasing interest has recently been shown in analyzing the worst-case behavior of local search algorithms. In particular, the quality of local optima and the time needed to find the local optima by the simplest form of local search has been studied. This paper deals with worst-case performance...

We consider a scheduling problem where a set of jobs is distributed over parallel machines. The processing time of any job is dependent on the usage of a scarce renewable resource, e.g., personnel. An amount of k units of that resource can be allocated to the jobs at any time, and the more of...

Many online problems encountered in real-life involve a twostage decision process: upon arrival of a new request, an irrevocable firststage decision (the assignment of a specific resource to the request) must be made immediately, while in a second stage process, certain “subinstances” (that...

In this paper we analyze equilibria in competitive environments under constraints across players'' strategies. This means that the action taken by one player limits the possible choices of the other players. In this context the classical approach, Kakutani''s Fixed Point theorem, does not work....

We consider several parallel machine scheduling settings with the objective to minimize the schedule makespan. The most general of these settings is unrelated parallel machine scheduling. We assume that, in addition to its machine dependence, the processing time of any job is dependent on the...

The paper introduces a model for online parallel machine scheduling, where any single machine is run on the basis of a locally optimal sequencing policy. Jobs choose the machine on which they want to be processed themselves, and in addition, any job owns a piece of private information, namely...

This paper introduces new ejection chain strategies to effectively target vehicle routing problems with time window constraints (VRPTW). Ejection chain procedures are based on the idea of compound moves that allow a variable number of solution components to be modified within any single...

The Nearest Neighbor classifier has shown to be a powerful tool for multiclass classification. In this note we explore both theoretical properties and empirical behavior of a variant of such method, in which the Nearest Neighbor rule is applied after selecting a set of so-called prototypes,...

We consider a scheduling problem where a set of jobs is distributed over parallel machines. The processing time of any job is dependent on the usage of a scarce renewable resource, e.g., personnel. An amount of k units of that resource can be allocated to the jobs at any time, and the more of...