A Best Cost-Sharing Rule for Selfish Bin Packing
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In selfish bin packing, each item is regarded as a player, who aims to minimize the cost-share by choosing a bin it can fit in. To have a least number of bins used, cost-sharing rules play an important role. The currently best known cost sharing rule has a lower bound on PoA larger than 1.45, while a general lower bound 4/3 on PoA applies to any cost-sharing rule under which no items have incentive unilaterally moving to an empty bin. In this paper, we propose a novel and simple rule with a PoA matching the lower bound, thus completely resolving this game. The new rule always admits a Nash equilibrium and its PoS is one. Furthermore, the well-known bin packing algorithm BFD (Best-Fit Decreasing) is shown to achieve a strong equilibrium, implying that a stable packing with an asymptotic approximation ratio of 11/9 can be produced in polynomial time.
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