Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
fact that one or more agents in the game, such as agents
A
3
and
A
4
,
are not certain about their own belief, hence their own preferences.
Such uncertainty inevitably leads to the uncertainty of the stability of
coalitions, even if these agents are not directly involved in the coali-
tions under consideration, because a coalition that involves agents with
internal uncertainty might, if stable, become a more attractive alter-
native to other agents in coalitions that otherwise will certainly be
stable.
Example 3.4
Consider again the scenario of agents
A
1
,
A
2
,
A
3
and
A
4
. The group
{A
1
,A
2
}
will certainly be stable if both agents
A
3
and
A
4
conclude that the current movie is not good. However, although
there is no internal uncertainty of belief in agents
A
1
and
A
2
,the
group
will still become unstable if
A
3
and
A
4
conclude that
the current movie is good, as forming the group
{
A
1
,A
2
}
to
watch the movie will definitely be a more attractive alternative to
agents
A
1
and
A
2
.
{
A
1
,A
2
,A
3
,A
4
}
To the best of our knowledge, there have not been any coalition
formation algorithms proposed for such type of NTU-IU games.
One reason for that could be the current lack of meaningful solution
concepts. As mentioned above, the existing probability-based solution
concepts are unsuitable for this type of games for two reasons. First,
these existing works focus mainly on games with transferable utilities.
Second, there are cases where a probabilistic model is not suitable,
such as multi-agent cooperation games where the samples (agents' ex-
periences) are too sparse to provide any meaningful estimation of the
probability distributions, as seen in the scenario considered in this
section. Actually, the probability models are generally inadequate for
applications where the agents employ rule-based reasoning and knowl-
edge is kept in form of decision rules or in decision tables, which is the
case in many A.I. systems.
For these reasons, we need a new solution concept that is suitable
for NTU-IU games in general, which will be described in upcoming
Search WWH ::
Custom Search