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agent forms a 'coalition' of a single agent alone, a situation we assume
to be least preferred by each agent. Furthermore, we assume that the
accepted proposal is not final and not binding until the end of the ne-
gotiation process, which means that an agent is free to break from his
current commitment in case of getting a better proposal. Thus, start-
ing from the default coalition structure, the agents proceed to make
stepwise improvements by proposing alternative coalition structures.
A proposal is considered successful if it is accepted by all the members
of at least one coalition in the alternative coalition structure.
In order to investigate the effect on stability caused by such belief-
based strategy, we consider the mechanism as illustrated in Figure 4.1,
which is a typical randomised approach for coalition formation games.
The mechanism, beginning with some initial coalition structure, are
divided into rounds, and in each round, one of the agents is randomly
selected. The randomly selected agent is then allowed to make proposal
A Typical Randomised Coalition Formation Mechanism
Repeat until the pre-designated number of rounds is reached, or no new proposal
is accepted in a pre-designated consecutive number of rounds:
1. Randomly select an agent as the next proposing agent. Let
C
be the coalition
whereheiscurrentlyamemberof.
2. The proposing agent finds and proposes an alternative coalition.
3. If such an alternative coalition
C
is found, the proposing agent then sends
proposal messages to each members of
C
.
4. The recipient of a proposal message responses as follows: accepts it if it
prefers the proposed coalition
C
to the coalition that it is currently in; or
rejects it otherwise.
5. If the proposal
C
is accepted by all recipients, form the new coalition struc-
ture as follows:
a. Each member of
C
leaves their previous coalition and become member
of
C
.
b. All other agents (that are not invited to join
C
)remaininthesame
coalition as before.
6. Go to step 1.
Fig. 4.1
A distributed coalition formation mechanism.
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