• Appreciation of a coalition depends respectively on the most preferred and least preferred subcoalition(s). ‣ Preferences satisfy top responsiveness if the following conditions hold: i) each coalition contains a unique most preferred subcoalition (called a choice set); ii) appreciation of a coalition depends on the choice set; iii) if two coalitions have the same choice set, then the smaller ...

In this paper, we introduce a component efficient value for TU games with a coalition structure which reflects the outside options of players within the same structural coalition. It is based on the idea that splitting a coalition should affect players who stay together in the same way. We show that for all TU games there is a coalition structure that is stable with respect to this value. Journ...

Coordination and cooperation of artificial autonomous agents is activity for effective problems solution. Coalition formation is by one of cooperative mechanisms used in multi-agent systems. Various approaches of multi-agent coalition formation ensure coalition stability, optimal allocation of sources and payoff distribution for efficient achievement of individual or collective goals. The paper...

The Shapley value is defined as the average marginal contribution of a player, taken over all possible ways to form the grand coalition N when one starts from the empty coalition and adds players one by one. In a previous paper, the authors have introduced an allocation scheme for a general model of coalition formation where the evolution of the coalition of active players is ruled by a Markov ...

We consider optimizing the coalition structure in Coalitional Skill Games (CSGs), a succinct representation of coalitional games (Bachrach and Rosenschein 2008). In CSGs, the value of a coalition depends on the tasks its members can achieve. The tasks require various skills to complete them, and agents may have different skill sets. The optimal coalition structure is a partition of the agents t...

The purpose of this article is to analyze a class of voting games in a partition approach. We consider a society in which coalitions can be formed and where a finite number of voters have to choose among a set of alternatives. A coalition is winning if it can veto any proposed alternative. In our model, the veto power of a coalition is dependent on the coalition formation of the outsiders. We s...

Considering coalition structures formed by an external licensor of a patented technology and oligopolistic firms, we investigate licensing agreements that can be reached as the bargaining outcomes under those coalition structures. The cores for coalition structures are empty, unless the grand coalition forms. We give the necessary and sufficient condition for the core (for the grand coalition) ...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TUgame and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy’s (1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in order to compare it to the top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (2001) that guarantees nonemptin...

We study coalition formation and the strategic timing of membership of an IEA for environmental issues in the Coalitional Bargaining Game (CBG) of Gomes (2005, Econometrica). For the general CBG, we derive the necessary and sufficient condition for immediate formation of the grand coalition. We apply the CBG to a river sharing problem with two symmetric upstream agents and one downstream agent....

The study of the buyer coalition has been reviewed by researchers for decades. However, there are few schemes applying ant colony optimization (ACO) for forming buyer coalition. In this paper, the approach called the Ant Colony for Buyer Coalition (ACBC) algorithm is proposed to form the buyer coalition with bundles of items. The main endeavor of the algorithm is to partition the whole group of...