A Distributed Algorithm for Coalition Formation among E-commerce Agents

Since no optimal structure exists, organizations have to be exible to dynamically react towards environment changes. In an economic context, agents are strongly autonomous and weakly rational and have to deal with cooperation and competition , as in task repartition domain. This paper proposes an open and distributed protocol based on exchange of preferences computed using qualitative and quantitative criteria: agents will agree on coalitions to form in order to fullll tasks. We are going to prove that our protocol converges to reach consensus. Experimentation shows that the most rigid strategy is not optimal and that higher competition leads to easier consensus.