Multi-criteria Coalition Formation Games

When forming coalitions, agents have different utilities per coalition. Game-theoretic approaches typically assume that the scalar utility for each agent for each coalition is public information. However, we argue that this is not a realistic assumption, as agents may not want to divulge this information or are even incapable of expressing it. To mitigate this, we propose the multi-criteria coalition formation game model, in which there are different publicly available quality metrics (corresponding to different criteria or objectives) for which a value is publicly available for each coalition. The agents have private utility functions that determine their preferences with respect to these criteria, and thus also with respect to the different coalitions. Assuming that we can ask agents to compare two coalitions, we propose a heuristic algorithm for finding stable partitions in MC2FGs: local stability search (LSS). We show that while theoretically individually stable partitions need not exist in MC2FGs in general, empirically stable partitions can be found. Furthermore, we show that we can find individually stable partitions after asking only a small number of comparisons, which is highly important when we want to apply this model in practice.