In order to more effectively explore a large unknown area, multiple robots may be employed to work cooperatively. When properly done, the group allocates specific portions of the overall exploration task to different robots such that the entire environment is explored with minimal excess effort. In this work, we present a new hierarchical market-based approach to this allocation problem. Our ap...

This paper studies whether characteristics of policy networks can help us understand policy change. The relation between policy networks and policy outputs is complex. I argue that taking into account the institutional context in which decision-making takes place allows understanding which policy network structures favor major policy change and which ones breed outputs close to the status quo. ...

Evaluation designs assessing community coalitions must balance measures of how coalitions do their work and evidence that the coalitions are making a difference. The Allies cross-site evaluation attempts to determine the combined effects of the seven coalitions' work at the individual, organizational, and community levels. Principal components considered are (a) contextual factors of the coalit...

Behavioral plasticity within species is adaptive which directs survival traits to take multiple pathways under varying conditions. Male-male cooperation is an evolutionary strategy often exhibiting an array of alternatives between and within species. African male lions coalesce to safeguard territories and mate acquisition. Unique to these coalitions is lack of strict hierarchies between partne...

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in non-democratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternativ...

Human users form coalitions to solve complex tasks and earn rewards. Examples of such coalition formation can be found in the military, education, and business domains. Multiagent coalition formation techniques cannot be readily used to form human coalitions due to the unique aspects of the human coalition formation problem, e.g., uncertainty in human user behavior and changes in human user beh...

Coalitions are collaborative networks of autonomous domains where resource sharing is achieved by the distribution of access permissions to coalition members based on negotiated resource-sharing agreements. The focus of our research is on dynamic coalitions, namely, coalitions where member domains may leave or new domains may join during the life of the coalition. We have developed a set of too...

This paper considers an exchange economy with a measure space of agents and consumption externalities, which take into account two possible external effects in consumers’ preferences: the dependence upon prices and other agents’ consumptions, respectively, as in Greenberg et al. [12] and Khan and Vohra [15] (see also Balder [4] for a general discussion). This allows to cover a general model of ...

We generalize the class of apex game by combining a winning coalition of symmetric minor players with a collection of apex sets which can form winning coalitions only together with a fixed quota of minor players. By applying power indices to these games and their subgames we generate players’ preferences over coalitions which we use to define a coalition formation game. We focus on strongly mon...

Recently, the multi-agent system approach is a very fast-growing technology. Because of its distributed nature it can be used in many applications to settle sophisticated problems, such as planning, scheduling, etc. A multi agent system consists of several autonomous agents with their own strategy and behaviour. Agents cooperate with each other to achieve common goals. Cooperating agents create...