In many multiagent scenarios, groups of participants (known as coalitions) may attempt to cooperate, seeking to increase the benefits realized by the members. Depending on the scenario, such cooperation may be benign, or may be unwelcome or even forbidden (often called collusion). Coalitions can present a problem for many multiagent systems, potentially undermining the intended operation of sys...

Strategic information systems planning (SISP) is an exercise or ongoing activity that enables organisations to develop priorities for information systems development. It has been suggested that the ‘SISP approach’, a combination of method, process and implementation, is the most complete way of describing SISP activity. Based upon questionnaire responses from 267 IT Directors, four distinct app...

When multiple agents solve their own problems while they interact with each other, it is helpful to form a coalition, which is a group of agents working together. Previous approaches to coalition formation have proposed to de ne the utility of coalitions and to use a strategy that agents form coalitions for getting higher utility. However, in some problems, the utility of coalitions is not easi...

In this paper, we examine the questions of which coalition structure is formed and how payoãis distributed among players in cooperative games with externalities. We introduce a sequential stability concept called a sequentially stable payoãconåguration in a game with a coalition structure by extending the concept of the equilibrium binding agreements by Ray and Vohra (1997). Ray and Vohra captu...

We propose an approach for analysing trends in the contributions of social groups to electoral coalitions, and apply this approach to an analysis of the impact of changes in the race, religion, class, and gender cleavages on coalitions in U.S. Presidential elections between 1960 and 1992. We improve on existing studies of party coalitions by developing a multivariate model that measures group-s...

Between 1999 and 2009, since no single party was in a position to lead a majority in the Lok Sabha, preelectoral coalitions have become the only option for parties to exercise executive power at the Centre. Looking at the trajectory of two pre-electoral coalitions over ten years, namely the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance and the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance, the paper attempts...

We survey the recent developments in the studies of cooperative games under fuzzy environment. The basic problems of a cooperative game in both crisp and fuzzy contexts are to find how the coalitions form vis-á-vis how the coalitions distribute the worth. One of the fuzzification processes assumes that the coalitions thus formed are fuzzy in nature having only partial participations of the play...

This work shows that the formation of a finite number of coalitions in a nonatomic network congestion game benefits everyone. At the equilibrium of the composite game played by coalitions and individuals, the average cost to each coalition and the individuals’ common cost are all lower than in the corresponding nonatomic game (without coalitions). The individuals’ cost is lower than the average...