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Chapter 4
The b-Core: Belief-based Coalition
Stability
Ninety-nine percent of all problems in
communications start with misunder-
standings which develop as a result of
differing viewpoints and conditioning.
Anonymous
Coalition stability is an important concept in coalition forma-
tion. One common assumption in many stability criteria in
non-transferable utility games is that the preference of each
agent is publicly known, so that a coalition is said to be sta-
ble if there are no objections by any sub-groups of agents ac-
cording to the publicly known preferences. However, in many
applications including some software agent applications, this
assumption is not realistic. Instead, intelligent agents are mod-
elled as individuals with private beliefs, and decisions are
made according to those individual private beliefs instead of
common knowledge. Such belief-based agent architectures have
impacts on the coalitions stability which are not reflected in
the current stability criteria.
In the previous chapter, we have introduced the concepts
of strong cores and weak cores, which capture the
internal un-
certainty
of agent beliefs, that is, the uncertainty of an agent
about the current prevailing state, on which the agent's pref-
erence is dependent. In this chapter, we explore the second
direction where the classical stability based on the core can
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