In coalition formation with self-interested agents both social welfare of the multi-agent system and stability of individual coalitions must be taken into account. However, in large-scale systems with thousands of agents, finding an optimal solution with respect to both metrics is infeasible. In this paper we propose an approach for finding coalition structures with suboptimal social welfare an...

Purpose Describe the surgical technique of talocalcaneal coalition resection using live CT navigation. Methods A ten-year-old female with left talocalcaneal coalition hindfoot pain refractory to conservative management underwent surgical coalition resection using live CT navigation. The procedure and discussion of this technique is described in detail. Results With minimal radiation exposur...

The fact that a coalition has a strategy does not mean that the coalition knows what the strategy is. If the coalition knows the strategy, then such a strategy is called a know-how strategy of the coalition. The paper proposes the notion of a second-order know-how strategy for the case when one coalition knows what the strategy of another coalition is. The main technical result is a sound and c...

Coalition formation in characteristic function games entails agents partitioning themselves into a coalition structure and assigning the numeric rewards of each coalition via a payoff vector. Various coalition structure generation algorithms have been proposed that guarantee that an optimal coalition structure is found. We present the Synergy Coalition Group-based Dynamic Programming (SCGDP) al...

Coalition formation in multi-agent systems (MAS) is becoming increasingly important as it increases the ability of agents to execute tasks and maximize their payoffs. Dependence relations are regarded as the foundation of coalition formation. This paper proposes a novel dependence theory namely transitive dependence theory for dynamic coalition formation in multi-agent systems. Transitive depen...

In this paper, we anatomize incentive structures in peer assisted services with multiple content providers and focus on stability issues from two different angles: stability at equilibrium of Shapley value and convergence to the equilibrium. We first define a coalition game in a peer assisted service with multiple content providers by classifying the types of coalition structures as separated, ...

Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation to promote cutting edge research as well as the advancement of young researchers and women, technology transfer, outreach and education, the NCCR (Swiss National Centre of Competence in Research) Chemical Biology is co-led by Howard Riezman, University of Geneva and Kai Johnsson, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL).

A coalitional (or cooperative) game is a model of interacting decision-makers that focuses on the behavior of groups of players. N denotes the set of players. A coalition is a group of players S ⊂ N . We refer to N as the grand coalition. Every coalition S has a set of available actions AS. An outcome consists of a partition of N (coalition structure) and one action associated with each coaliti...

A value for games with a coalition structure is introduced, where the rules guiding cooperation among the members of the same coalition are different from the interaction rules among coalitions. In particular, players inside a coalition exhibit a greater degree of solidarity than they are willing to use with players outside their coalition. The Shapley value is therefore used to compute the agg...

The existence of a coalition strategy to achieve a goal does not necessarily mean that the coalition has enough information to know how to follow the strategy. Neither does it mean that the coalition knows that such a strategy exists. The paper studies an interplay between the distributed knowledge, coalition strategies, and coalition “know-how” strategies. The main technical result is a sound ...