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Communicated by M. Cosnard In this paper we investigate the problem of designing load balancing protocols in distributed systems involving self-interested participants. These participants have their own requirements and objectives and no a-priori motivation for cooperation. Their self-ish behavior may lead to poor performance and ineciency. To address this problem we design a load balancing mechanism with verication that provides incentives to partici-pants to report their true parameters and follow the given algorithm. We prove that our load balancing mechanism is truthful (i.e., agents will be better o by reporting their true parameters) and satises the voluntary participation condition (i.e., truthful agents never incur a loss). We present a simulation study to show the performance of our load balancing mechanism