On top coalitions, common rankings, and semistrict core stability

The top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (2001) and the common ranking property of Farrell and Scotchmer (1988) are sufficient conditions for core stability in hedonic games. We introduce the semistrict core as a stronger stability concept than the core, and show that the top coalition property guarantees the existence of semistrictly core stable coalition structures. Moreover, for each game satisfying the common ranking property, the core and the semistrict core coincide.coalition formation, common ranking property, hedonic games, semistrict core, top coalition property

Computational Complexity in Additive Hedonic Games

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. Furthermore, the corresponding decision problems with respect to the existence of a Nash stable coalition structure and of an individually stable coalition structure turn out to be NP-complete in the strong sense.Additive Preferences, Coalition Formation, Computational Complexity, Hedonic Games, NP-hard, NP-complete

Top coalitions, common rankings, and semistrict core stability

The top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (2001) and the common ranking property of Farrell and Scotchmer (1988) are sufficient conditions for core stability in hedonic games. We introduce the semistrict core as a stronger stability concept than the core, and show that the top coalition property guarantees the existence of semistrictly core stable coalition structures. Moreover, for each game satisfying the common ranking property, the core and the semistrict core coincide.coalition formation

Computational Complexity in Additive Hedonic Games

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. Furthermore, the corresponding decision problems with respect to the existence of a Nash stable coalition structure and of an individually stable coalition structure turn out to be NP-complete in the strong sense

A Taxonomy of Myopic Stability Concepts for Hedonic Games

We present a taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games in terms of deviations, and discuss the status of the existence problems of stable coalition tructures. In particular, we show that contractual strictly core stable coalition tructures always exist, and provide su¢ cient conditions for the existence of con- ractually Nash stable and weak individually stable coalition structures on the class of separable games.Coalition formation, Hedonic games, Separability, Taxonomy

A taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games

We present a taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games in terms of deviations, and discuss the status of the existence problems of stable coalition structures. In particular, we show that contractual strictly core stable coalition structures always exist, and provide sufficient conditions for the existence of contractually Nash stable and weak individually stable coalition structures on the class of separable games.coalition formation, hedonic games, separability, taxonomy

Hedonic Games and Monte Carlo Simulation

Hedonic games have applications in economics and multi-agent systems where the grouping preferences of an individual is important. Hedonic games look at coalition formation, amongst the players, where players have a preference relation over all the coalition. Hedonic games are also known as coalition formation games, and they are a form of a cooperative game with a non-transferrable utility game. Some examples of hedonic games are stable marriage, stable roommate, and hospital/residence problem. The study of hedonic games is driven by understanding what coalition structures will be stable, i.e., given a coalition structure, no players have an incentive to deviate to or form another coalition. Different solution concepts exist for solving hedonic games; the one that we use in our study is core stability. From the computational perspective, finding any stable coalition structure of a hedonic game is challenging. In this research, we use Monte Carlo methods to find the solution of millions of hedonic with the hope of finding some empirical points of interest. We aim to explore the distribution of the number of stable coalition structures for a given randomly generated hedonic game and to analyze that distribution using Cullen and Frey graph approach

Simple Causes of Complexity in Hedonic Games

Hedonic games provide a natural model of coalition formation among self-interested agents. The associated problem of finding stable outcomes in such games has been extensively studied. In this paper, we identify simple conditions on expressivity of hedonic games that are sufficient for the problem of checking whether a given game admits a stable outcome to be computationally hard. Somewhat surprisingly, these conditions are very mild and intuitive. Our results apply to a wide range of stability concepts (core stability, individual stability, Nash stability, etc.) and to many known formalisms for hedonic games (additively separable games, games with W-preferences, fractional hedonic games, etc.), and unify and extend known results for these formalisms. They also have broader applicability: for several classes of hedonic games whose computational complexity has not been explored in prior work, we show that our framework immediately implies a number of hardness results for them.Comment: 7+9 pages, long version of a paper in IJCAI 201

Hedonic coalition formation games: A new stability notion

Cataloged from PDF version of article.This paper studies hedonic coalition formation games where each player's preferences rely only upon the members of her coalition. A new stability notion under free exit-free entry membership rights, referred to as strong Nash stability, is introduced which is stronger than both core and Nash stabilities studied earlier in the literature. Strong Nash stability has an analogue in non-cooperative games and it is the strongest stability notion appropriate to the context of hedonic coalition formation games. The weak top-choice property is introduced and shown to be sufficient for the existence of a strongly Nash stable partition. It is also shown that descending separable preferences guarantee the existence of a strongly Nash stable partition. Strong Nash stability under different membership rights is also studied. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved