On the Nisan-Ronen conjecture for submodular valuations

Abstract: We consider incentive compatible mechanisms for a domain that is very close to the domain of scheduling $n$ unrelated machines: the single exception is that the valuation of just one machine is submodular. For the scheduling problem with such cost functions, we give a lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ on the approximation ratio of incentive compatible deterministic mechanisms. This is a strong information-theoretic impossibility result on the approximation ratio of mechanisms on relatively simple domains. The lower bound of the current work assumes no restriction on the mechanism side, but an expanded class of valuations, in contrast to previous general results on the Nisan-Ronen conjecture that hold for only special classes of mechanisms such as local, strongly monotone, and anonymous mechanisms. Our approach is based on a novel characterization of appropriately selected smaller instances that allows us to focus on particular type of algorithms (linear mechanisms), from which we extract a locality property that gives the lower bound.