Altruism in Coalition Formation Games

TL;DR

This paper extends altruistic coalition formation models to general coalition games, highlighting the importance of considering all friends in altruistic behavior, and analyzes stability and computational aspects.

Contribution

It introduces a generalized altruistic coalition formation model that includes friends outside an agent's own coalition, addressing limitations of previous hedonic game models.

Findings

The model satisfies several desirable stability properties.

Verification and existence problems are computationally analyzed.

Excluding friends from altruism is a significant limitation in previous models.

Abstract

Nguyen et al. [1] introduced altruistic hedonic games in which agents' utilities depend not only on their own preferences but also on those of their friends in the same coalition. We propose to extend their model to coalition formation games in general, considering also the friends in other coalitions. Comparing our model to altruistic hedonic games, we argue that excluding some friends from the altruistic behavior of an agent is a major disadvantage that comes with the restriction to hedonic games. After introducing our model and showing some desirable properties, we additionally study some common stability notions and provide a computational analysis of the associated verification and existence problems.