Belief-Based Stability in Non-transferable Utility Coalition Formation with Uncertainty

Coalition stability is an important concept in coalition formation. One common assumption in many stability criteria in non-transferable utility games is that the preference of each agent is publicly known so that a coalition is said to be stable if there is no objections by any sub-group of agents according to the publicly known preferences. However, in many software agent applications, this assumption is not true. Instead, agents are modeled as individuals with private belief and decisions are made according to those beliefs instead of common knowledge. There are two types of uncertainty here. First, uncertainty in beliefs regarding the environment means that agents are also uncertain about their preference. Second, an agent’s actions can be influenced by his belief regarding other agents’ preferences. Such uncertainties have impacts on the coalition’s stability which is not reflected in the current stability criteria. In this paper, we extend the classic stability concept of the core by proposing new belief based stability criteria under uncertainty, and illustrate how the new concept can be used to analyze the stability of a new type of belief-based coalition formation game.