Authors:
            
                    Chi-Kong Chan
                    
                        
                    
                     and
                
                    Ho-Fung Leung
                    
                        
                    
                    
                
        
        
            Affiliation:
            
                    
                        
                    
                    The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
                
        
        
        
        
        
             Keyword(s):
            Coalition Formation, Stability, Uncertainty.
        
        
            
                Related
                    Ontology
                    Subjects/Areas/Topics:
                
                        Agents
                    ; 
                        Artificial Intelligence
                    ; 
                        Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems
                    ; 
                        Coordination in Multi-Agent Systems
                    ; 
                        Enterprise Information Systems
                    ; 
                        Intelligent Agents
                    ; 
                        Intelligent Social Agents and Distributed Artificial Intelligence Applications
                    ; 
                        Internet Technology
                    ; 
                        Web Information Systems and Technologies
                    
            
        
        
            
                Abstract: 
                Efficiency and stability are two important concepts in coalition formation analysis. One common assumption in many well-known criteria such as the core and Pareto- efficiency is that there exists a publicly known value for each coalition or sub-coalition. However, in software agent applications, this assumption is often not true as the agents rarely know the exact coalition values for certain. Instead, agents have to rely on whatever evidence they can observe, and evaluate those evidence according to their private information base on past experience. There are two sources of uncertainty here. First, such private information is often uncertain in nature or may even be self-conflicting. Second, the agents, which are heterogeneous and autonomous, may have different conflict resolution strategies. Such uncertainties make the traditional approaches unfit for many real-world problems, except perhaps, in idealized scenarios. In this paper, we extend the core and Pareto optimality criteria b
                y proposing a new rule based stability concepts under uncertain environment: the CU-Core.
                (More)