Qualitative criteria of admissibility for enforced agreements

This work studies how goal-directed agents can form profitable coalitions. A coalition is formed when some agents agree to cooperate for the achievement of a shared goal or to exchange with each other the achievement of their own goals. Assuming that coalition formation processes are supported by unanimous and enforced agreements, we define two qualitative criteria: the do-ut-des property and the indecomposable do-ut-des property. The do-ut-des property is based on a balance between the advantages and the burdens of the agents involved in a coalition. The indecomposable do-ut-des property is a refinement of the do-ut-des property that takes into account also the costs and the risks deriving from the coalition formation process. Two relevant aspects distinguish our approach from the solution criteria developed in cooperative game theory. First, the do-ut-des property and the indecomposable property are not based on an explicit utility function associated to the goals of an agent, and hence they can be used also in that cases in which the importance that agents give to their own goals is unknown. Second, a coalition has all the necessary information to establish if it satisfies the do-ut-des property or the indecomposable do-ut-des property, therefore these two properties can be used in the case not all the space of possible coalitions is known.