Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 6
The Complete Picture: sb-core and
wb-core
No civilization would ever have been
possible without a framework of sta-
bility, to provide the wherein for the
flux of change.
Hannah Arendt
As we have mentioned throughout this topic, coalition sta-
bility is perhaps one of the most important, and most fre-
quenctly cited concept in coalition formation. Traditionally,
there is a common assumption in many stability criteria that
the preference of each agent is publicly known. Under such an
assumption, a coalition's stability is rather straightforward to
compute: a coalition can be said to be stable if no sub-group
of participants can reject the original offer based on the pub-
licly known preferences, and obtain better results by breaking
away from the coalition. However, in computer science, and in
many software agent applications in particular, this assump-
tion is simply not true. The reason is that software agents are
typically modeled as individuals with private belief, and deci-
sions are made according to those beliefs instead of common
knowledge. And to complicate things a little bit, we are really
dealing with two different types of uncertainty here. The first
type is the uncertainties in beliefs regarding the environment,
which implies that they are also uncertain about their pri-
vate preferences. The second type is the uncertainties that an
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