Coalition Formation
Group agents into teams that maximise joint value and split the reward using a payoff rule whose fairness or stability property matches the deployment.
Description
Group agents into teams that create the most value together, then split the reward fairly. First write down how much value each possible team can produce. Then find the grouping that maximises total value. Then divide each team's reward using a payoff rule that matches what you need: fairness, stability, or keeping the most upset member as happy as possible. Common rules are a fair-share split (the Shapley value), a no-defection split (the core), and a minimise-the-worst-complaint split (the nucleolus). This is more than ad-hoc team building. It gives compact ways to record team values, an account of which payoff rules you can actually compute, and the fairness-versus-stability trade-offs each rule makes.
When to apply
Use this when several agents could pool resources or skills to produce more together than apart, and the hard question is who joins which team and who gets what share. Examples are joint planning, resource pooling, federated computation, and multi-agent task delivery. Don't apply it when agents are interchangeable and any grouping is fine; simple partitioning is enough. One exception: even interchangeable agents may benefit from this when coordinating inside a team is itself costly.
What it involves
- Choose how to record team values
- Find the best grouping
- Pick a payoff-splitting rule
- Compute the split
- Verify stability and fairness
- Re-plan when agents or values shift
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