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Coalition formation under uncertainty: bargaining equilibria and the Bayesian core stability concept

Published: 14 May 2007 Publication History

Abstract

Coalition formation is a problem of great interest in AI, allowing groups of autonomous, rational agents to form stable teams. Furthermore, the study of coalitional stability concepts and their relation to equilibria that guide the strategic interactions of agents during bargaining has lately attracted much attention. However, research to date in both AI and economics has largely ignored the potential presence of uncertainty when studying either coalitional stability or coalitional bargaining. This paper is the first to relate a (cooperative) stability concept under uncertainty, the Bayesian core (BC), with (non-cooperative) equilibrium concepts of coalitional bargaining games. We prove that if the BC of a coalitional game (and of each subgame) is non-empty, then there exists an equilibrium of the corresponding bargaining game that produces a BC element; and conversely, if there exists a coalitional bargaining equilibrium (with certain properties), then it induces a BC configuration. We thus provide a non-cooperative justification of the BC stability concept. As a corollary, we establish a sufficient condition for the existence of the BC. Finally, for small games, we provide an algorithm to decide whether the BC is non-empty.

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  1. Coalition formation under uncertainty: bargaining equilibria and the Bayesian core stability concept

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    AAMAS '07: Proceedings of the 6th international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems
    May 2007
    1585 pages
    ISBN:9788190426275
    DOI:10.1145/1329125
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 14 May 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. coalition formation
    2. multilateral bargaining

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    • (2022)Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Optimal Equivalent Action of NeighborhoodActuators10.3390/act1104009911:4(99)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2022
    • (2022)Deep Coalitional Q-Learning for Dynamic Coalition Formation in Edge ComputingIEICE Transactions on Information and Systems10.1587/transinf.2021KBP0007E105.D:5(864-872)Online publication date: 1-May-2022
    • (2022)Coalition Games for Performance Evaluation in 5G and Beyond Networks: A SurveyIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2022.314615810(15393-15420)Online publication date: 2022
    • (2020)Contextual and Possibilistic Reasoning for Coalition FormationAI10.3390/ai10300261:3(389-417)Online publication date: 19-Sep-2020
    • (2020)A Coalitional Markov Decision Process Model for Dynamic Coalition Formation among Agents2020 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT)10.1109/WIIAT50758.2020.00044(308-315)Online publication date: Dec-2020
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