The probabilistic analysis of a heuristic for the assignment problem
SIAM Journal on Computing
Methods for task allocation via agent coalition formation
Artificial Intelligence
Reducing buyer search costs: implications for electronic marketplaces
Management Science - Special issue: Frontier research on information systems and economics
Coalition structure generation with worst case guarantees
Artificial Intelligence
A stable and efficient buyer coalition formation scheme for e-marketplaces
Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Autonomous agents
Asynchronous Teams: Cooperation Schemes for Autonomous Agents
Journal of Heuristics
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Coalition Formation for Large-Scale Electronic Markets
ICMAS '00 Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on MultiAgent Systems (ICMAS-2000)
Mechanisms for coalition formation and cost sharing in an electronic marketplace
ICEC '03 Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Electronic commerce
Traderbots: a new paradigm for robust and efficient multirobot coordination in dynamic environments
Traderbots: a new paradigm for robust and efficient multirobot coordination in dynamic environments
Cooperative exploration in the electronic marketplace
AAAI'05 Proceedings of the 20th national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Multi-goal economic search using dynamic search structures
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Cooperative games with overlapping coalitions
Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research
Sequential multi-agent exploration for a common goal
Web Intelligence and Agent Systems
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In this paper we show how taking advantage of autonomous agents' capability to maintain parallel interactions with others, and incorporating it into the cooperative economic search model results in a new search strategy which outperforms current strategies in use. As a framework for our analysis we use the electronic marketplace, where buyer agents have the incentive to search cooperatively. The new search technique is quite intuitive, however its analysis and the process of extracting the optimal search strategy are associated with several significant complexities. These difficulties are derived mainly from the unbounded search space and simultaneous dual affects of decisions taken along the search. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the model, highlighting, demonstrating and proving important characteristics of the optimal search strategy. Consequently, we manage to come up with an efficient modular algorithm for extracting the optimal cooperative search strategy for any given environment. A computational based comparative illustration of the system performance using the new search technique versus the traditional methods is given, emphasizing the main differences in the optimal strategy's structure and the advantage of using the proposed model.