On the Nisan-Ronen conjecture

The Nisan-Ronen conjecture states that no truthful mechanism for makespan-minimization when allocating m tasks to n unrelated machines can have approximation ratio less than n. Over more than two decades since its formulation, little progress has been made in resolving it and the best known lower bound is still a small constant. This work makes progress towards validating the conjecture by showing a lower bound of 1 + √ n -1.