In an electronic marketplace coalition formation allows buyers to enjoy a price discount for each item while combinatorial auction enables buyers to place bids for a bundle of items that are complementary. Coalition formation and combinatorial auction both help to improve the e ciency of a market and have received much attention from economists and computer scientists. But neither in laboratori...

In the paper, a yes-no model of influence is generalized to a multi-choice framework. We introduce and study weighted influence indices of a coalition on a player in a social network, where players have an ordered set of possible actions. Each player has an inclination to choose one of the actions. Due to influence of a coalition of other players, a final decision of the player may be different...

1 In multi-agent systems (MAS), coalition formation is typically studied using characteristic function game (CFG) representations, where the performance of any coalition is independent from co-existing coalitions in the system. However, in a number of environments, there are significant externalities from coalition formation where the effectiveness of one coalition may be affected by the format...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has formed a Modeling and Simulation (M&S) Group (MSG) to investigate how M&S can enhance NATO's mission accomplishment and promote cooperation its use. The recently formed MSG-145, is tasked to mature the efforts of the MSG-085 and 048 from an academic study into a truly operational capability. C2SIM provides individual nations a capability to use ...

We present a modal logic for reasoning about what groups of agents can bring about by collective action. Given a set of states, we introduce game frames which associate with every state a strategic game among the agents. Game frames are essentially extensive games of perfect information with simultaneous actions, where every action profile is associated with a new state, the outcome of the game...

We study the provision of public goods when all agents have complete information and can write binding agreements. This framework is in deliberate contrast to a traditional view of the free-rider problem based on hidden information or voluntary provision. We focus on coalition formation as a potential source of inefficiency. To this end, we develop a notion of an equilibrium coalition structure...

Cooperating and sharing resources by creating coalitions of agents are an important way for autonomous agents to execute tasks and to maximize payo . Such coalitions will form only if each member of a coalition gains more if it joins the coalition than it could gain otherwise. There are several ways of creating such coalitions and dividing the joint payo among the members. In this paper we pres...

Coalition structure generation has received considerable attention in recent research. Several algorithms have been proposed to solve this problem in Characteristic Function Games (CFGs), where every coalition is assumed to perform equally well in any coalition structure containing it. In contrast, very little attention has been given to the more general Partition Function Games (PFGs), where a...

* 0-7803-7952-7/03/$17.00 © 2003 IEEE. Abstract In this paper we propose a coalition formation model for a cooperative multiagent system in which an agent forms sub-optimal coalitions in view of incomplete information about its noisy, dynamic, and uncertain world, and its need to respond to events within time constraints. Our model has two stages: (1) when an agent detects an event in the world...

Coalition tactical networks are composed of different networks of two or more nations coming together for securing a mission in the tactical arena. Cyber security is an important consideration in coalition operations, and is a complex challenge due to the need for operational effectiveness, as well as for limited trust relationships that exist among coalition partners. New emerging paradigms in...