An Evolutionary Approach to Coalition Formation

Abstract

In Cooperative Games with Externalities when the members of a set S \subset N of agents wish to deviate they need to calculate their worth. This worth depends on what the non-members (outsiders) N \setminus S will do, which in turn depends on which coalition structure the outsiders will form. Since this coalition formation problem is NP-hard, various approaches have been adopted. In this paper using an evolutionary game theoretic approach we provide a set of equations that can help agents in S reason about the coalition structures the outsiders may form in terms of minimum distances on an n-s dimensional space, where n=|N|, s=|S|.