800 research outputs found
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
Strategyproof Mechanisms for Additively Separable Hedonic Games and Fractional Hedonic Games
Additively separable hedonic games and fractional hedonic games have received
considerable attention. They are coalition forming games of selfish agents
based on their mutual preferences. Most of the work in the literature
characterizes the existence and structure of stable outcomes (i.e., partitions
in coalitions), assuming that preferences are given. However, there is little
discussion on this assumption. In fact, agents receive different utilities if
they belong to different partitions, and thus it is natural for them to declare
their preferences strategically in order to maximize their benefit. In this
paper we consider strategyproof mechanisms for additively separable hedonic
games and fractional hedonic games, that is, partitioning methods without
payments such that utility maximizing agents have no incentive to lie about
their true preferences. We focus on social welfare maximization and provide
several lower and upper bounds on the performance achievable by strategyproof
mechanisms for general and specific additive functions. In most of the cases we
provide tight or asymptotically tight results. All our mechanisms are simple
and can be computed in polynomial time. Moreover, all the lower bounds are
unconditional, that is, they do not rely on any computational or complexity
assumptions
Relaxed Core Stability for Hedonic Games with Size-Dependent Utilities
We study relationships between different relaxed notions of core stability in hedonic games. In particular, we study (i) q-size core stable outcomes in which no deviating coalition of size at most q exists and (ii) k-improvement core stable outcomes in which no coalition can improve by a factor of more than k. For a large class of hedonic games, including fractional and additively separable hedonic games, we derive upper bounds on the maximum factor by which a coalition of a certain size can improve in a q-size core stable outcome. We further provide asymptotically tight lower bounds for a large class of hedonic games. Finally, our bounds allow us to confirm two conjectures by Fanelli et al. [Angelo Fanelli et al., 2021][IJCAI\u2721] for symmetric fractional hedonic games (S-FHGs): (i) every q-size core stable outcome in an S-FHG is also q/(q-1)-improvement core stable and (ii) the price of anarchy of q-size stability in S-FHGs is precisely 2q/q-1
-fractional Core Stability in Hedonic Games
Hedonic Games (HGs) are a classical framework modeling coalition formation of
strategic agents guided by their individual preferences. According to these
preferences, it is desirable that a coalition structure (i.e. a partition of
agents into coalitions) satisfies some form of stability. The most well-known
and natural of such notions is arguably core-stability. Informally, a partition
is core-stable if no subset of agents would like to deviate by regrouping in a
so-called core-blocking coalition. Unfortunately, core-stable partitions seldom
exist and even when they do, it is often computationally intractable to find
one. To circumvent these problems, we propose the notion of
-fractional core-stability, where at most an
-fraction of all possible coalitions is allowed to core-block. It
turns out that such a relaxation may guarantee both existence and
polynomial-time computation. Specifically, we design efficient algorithms
returning an -fractional core-stable partition, with
exponentially decreasing in the number of agents, for two fundamental classes
of HGs: Simple Fractional and Anonymous. From a probabilistic point of view,
being the definition of -fractional core equivalent to requiring
that uniformly sampled coalitions core-block with probability lower than
, we further extend the definition to handle more complex sampling
distributions. Along this line, when valuations have to be learned from samples
in a PAC-learning fashion, we give positive and negative results on which
distributions allow the efficient computation of outcomes that are
-fractional core-stable with arbitrarily high confidence.Comment: Accepted as poster at NeurIPS 202
Precise Complexity of the Core in Dichotomous and Additive Hedonic Games
Hedonic games provide a general model of coalition formation, in which a set
of agents is partitioned into coalitions, with each agent having preferences
over which other players are in her coalition. We prove that with additively
separable preferences, it is -complete to decide whether a core- or
strict-core-stable partition exists, extending a result of Woeginger (2013).
Our result holds even if valuations are symmetric and non-zero only for a
constant number of other agents. We also establish -completeness of
deciding non-emptiness of the strict core for hedonic games with dichotomous
preferences. Such results establish that the core is much less tractable than
solution concepts such as individual stability.Comment: ADT-2017, 15 pages in LNCS styl
Hedonic Games with Graph-restricted Communication
We study hedonic coalition formation games in which cooperation among the
players is restricted by a graph structure: a subset of players can form a
coalition if and only if they are connected in the given graph. We investigate
the complexity of finding stable outcomes in such games, for several notions of
stability. In particular, we provide an efficient algorithm that finds an
individually stable partition for an arbitrary hedonic game on an acyclic
graph. We also introduce a new stability concept -in-neighbor stability- which
is tailored for our setting. We show that the problem of finding an in-neighbor
stable outcome admits a polynomial-time algorithm if the underlying graph is a
path, but is NP-hard for arbitrary trees even for additively separable hedonic
games; for symmetric additively separable games we obtain a PLS-hardness
result
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