The Effect of Heterogeneity on Coalition Formation in Iterated Request for Proposal Scenarios

This paper explores a general model of economic exchange between heterogeneous agents representing firms, traders, or other socioeconomic entities, that self-organise into coalitions to face specific tasks. In particular, the work addresses coalition formation problems in which many tasks are addressed to the same population over time in an iterative fashion – giving the agents the possibility to organise themselves for specific tasks. In particular, the purpose of the paper is to describe the impact of task and skill heterogeneity in the population on the performance of the agents. Experiments are carried out for two common strategies from the economic world, namely competitive and conservative strategies. Results obtained show that competitive population outperforms conservative population, and that the heterogeneity degree has a direct effect on the advantage of the first strategy versus the second. We analyse experimental results by using a novel data mining technique called collaboration graphs.