An Evolutionary Approach to Coalition Formation

TL;DR

This paper introduces an evolutionary game theoretic method to approximate coalition formation in cooperative games with externalities, addressing the computational complexity of predicting outsiders' coalition structures.

Contribution

It develops a set of equations enabling agents to reason about outsiders' coalition structures using evolutionary game theory, offering a novel approach to a complex NP-hard problem.

Findings

Provides equations for coalition structure reasoning

Addresses NP-hard coalition formation problem

Uses evolutionary game theory for approximation

Abstract

In Cooperative Games with Externalities when the members of a set S \subset N of agents wish to deviate they need to calculate their worth. This worth depends on what the non-members (outsiders) N \setminus S will do, which in turn depends on which coalition structure the outsiders will form. Since this coalition formation problem is NP-hard, various approaches have been adopted. In this paper using an evolutionary game theoretic approach we provide a set of equations that can help agents in S reason about the coalition structures the outsiders may form in terms of minimum distances on an n-s dimensional space, where n=|N|, s=|S|.