Proceedings of the 7th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems - Volume 2
Power in threshold network flow games
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
The cooperative game theory foundations of network bargaining games
ICALP'10 Proceedings of the 37th international colloquium conference on Automata, languages and programming
Cooperative profit sharing in coalition-based resource allocation in wireless networks
IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (TON)
Approximate core allocation for large cooperative security games
ISRN Communications and Networking
Proof systems and transformation games
Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence
Computing cooperative solution concepts in coalitional skill games
Artificial Intelligence
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Coalition formation is a key problem in automated negotiation among self-interested agents, and other electronic commerce applications. A coalition of agents can sometimes accomplish things that the individual agents cannot, or can do things more efficiently. However, motivating the agents to abide to a solution requires careful analysis: only some of the solutions are stable in the sense that no group of agents is motivated to break off and form a new coalition. This constraint has been studied extensively in cooperative game theory. However, the computational questions around this constraint have received less attention. When it comes to coalition formation among software agents (that represent real-world parties), these questions become increasingly explicit.In this paper we define a concise general representation for games in characteristic form that relies on superadditivity, and show that it allows for efficient checking of whether a given outcome is in the core. We then show that determining whether the core is nonempty is NP-complete both with and without transferable utility. We demonstrate that what makes the problem hard in both cases is determining the collaborative possibilities (the set of outcomes possible for the grand coalition), by showing that if these are given, the problem becomes tractable in both cases. However, we then demonstrate that for a hybrid version of the problem, where utility transfer is possible only within the grand coalition, the problem remains NP-complete even when the collaborative possibilities are given.