A Class of Consistent Share Functions For Games in Coalition Structure

A cooperative game with transferable utility -or simply a TU-game- describes a situation in which players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation.A value function for these games is a function which assigns to every such a game a distribution of the payoffs over the players in the game.An alternative type of solutions are share functions which assign to every player in a TU-game its share in the payoffs to be distributed.In this paper we consider cooperative games in which the players are organized into an a priori coalition structure being a finite partition of the set of players.We introduce a general method for defining a class of share functions for such games in coalition structure using a multiplication property that states that the share of player i in the total payoff is equal to the share of player i in some internal game within i 's a priori coalition, multiplied by the share of this coalition in an external game between the a priori given coalitions.We show that these coalition structure share functions satisfy certain consistency properties.We provide axiomatizations of this class of coalition structure share functions using these consistency and multiplication properties.game theory

Forming Probably Stable Communities with Limited Interactions

A community needs to be partitioned into disjoint groups; each community member has an underlying preference over the groups that they would want to be a member of. We are interested in finding a stable community structure: one where no subset of members $S$ wants to deviate from the current structure. We model this setting as a hedonic game, where players are connected by an underlying interaction network, and can only consider joining groups that are connected subgraphs of the underlying graph. We analyze the relation between network structure, and one's capability to infer statistically stable (also known as PAC stable) player partitions from data. We show that when the interaction network is a forest, one can efficiently infer PAC stable coalition structures. Furthermore, when the underlying interaction graph is not a forest, efficient PAC stabilizability is no longer achievable. Thus, our results completely characterize when one can leverage the underlying graph structure in order to compute PAC stable outcomes for hedonic games. Finally, given an unknown underlying interaction network, we show that it is NP-hard to decide whether there exists a forest consistent with data samples from the network.Comment: 11 pages, full version of accepted AAAI-19 pape

The Logic of Joint Ability in Two-Player Tacit Games

Logics of joint strategic ability have recently received attention, with arguably the most influential being those in a family that includes Coalition Logic (CL) and Alternating-time Temporal Logic (ATL). Notably, both CL and ATL bypass the epistemic issues that underpin Schelling-type coordination problems, by apparently relying on the meta-level assumption of (perfectly reliable) communication between cooperating rational agents. Yet such epistemic issues arise naturally in settings relevant to ATL and CL: these logics are standardly interpreted on structures where agents move simultaneously, opening the possibility that an agent cannot foresee the concurrent choices of other agents. In this paper we introduce a variant of CL we call Two-Player Strategic Coordination Logic (SCL2). The key novelty of this framework is an operator for capturing coalitional ability when the cooperating agents cannot share strategic information. We identify significant differences in the expressive power and validities of SCL2 and CL2, and present a sound and complete axiomatization for SCL2. We briefly address conceptual challenges when shifting attention to games with more than two players and stronger notions of rationality

An Owen-type value for games with two-level communication structures

We introduce an Owen-type value for games with two-level communication structures, being structures where the players are partitioned into a coalition structure such that there exists restricted communication between as well as within the a priori unions of the coalition structure. Both types of communication restrictions are modeled by an undirected communication graph, so there is a communication graph between the unions of the coalition structure as well as a communication graph on the players in every union. We also show that, for particular two-level communication structures, the Owen value and the Aumann-Drèze value for games with coalition structures, the Myerson value for communication graph games and the equal surplus division solution appear as special cases of this new value