BACKGROUND Advocacy coalitions play an increasingly prominent role within the global health landscape, linking actors and institutions to attract political attention and resources. This paper examines how coalitions negotiate among themselves and exercise hidden forms of power to produce policy on the basis of their beliefs and strategic interests. METHODS This paper examines the beliefs and ...

Coalitions are a central part of economic, political, and social life, and coalition formation has been studied extensively within the mathematical social sciences. Agents (be they humans, robots, or software agents) have preferences over coalitions and, based on these preferences, it is natural to ask which coalitions are expected to form, and which coalition structures are better social outco...

Computing optimal coalition structures is an important research problem in multi-agent systems. It has rich application in real world problems, including logistics and supply chains. We study computing optimal coalition structures in linear production domains. The common goal of the agents is to maximize the system’s profit. Agents perform two steps: i) deliberate profitable coalitions, and ii)...

In a highly interconnected world, immunizing infections are a transboundary problem, and their control and elimination require international cooperation and coordination. In the absence of a global or regional body that can impose a universal vaccination strategy, each individual country sets its own strategy. Mobility of populations across borders can promote free-riding, because a country can...