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
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
A method for decentralized clustering in large multi-agent systems
AAMAS '03 Proceedings of the second international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent 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
Integrating parallel interactions into cooperative search
AAMAS '06 Proceedings of the fifth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
A compact representation scheme for coalitional games in open anonymous environments
AAAI'06 Proceedings of the 21st national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Cooperative exploration in the electronic marketplace
AAAI'05 Proceedings of the 20th national conference on Artificial intelligence - Volume 1
Searching for agent coalition using particle swarm optimization and death penalty function
ICIC'07 Proceedings of the intelligent computing 3rd international conference on Advanced intelligent computing theories and applications
Multi-goal economic search using dynamic search structures
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
Coevolution of heterogeneous multi-robot teams
Proceedings of the 12th annual conference on Genetic and evolutionary computation
Hi-index | 0.01 |
In this paper we present new search strategies for agents with diverse preferences searching cooperatively in complex environments with search costs. The uniqueness of our proposed mechanism is in the integration of the coalition's ability to partition itself into sub-coalitions, which continue the search autonomously, into the search strategy (a capability that was neglected in earlier cooperative search models). As we show throughout the paper, this strategy is always favorable in comparison to currently known cooperative and autonomous search techniques: it has the potential to significantly improve the searchers' performance in various environments and in any case guarantees reaching at least as good a performance as that of other known methods. Furthermore, for many common environments we manage to significantly eliminate the consequential added computational complexity associated with the partitioning option, by introducing innovative efficient algorithms for extracting the coalition's optimal search strategy. We illustrate the advantages of the proposed model over currently known cooperative and individual search techniques, using an environment based on authentic settings.