Belief Based Distributed Buyer Coalition Formation with Non-transferable Utility

Abstract

Online buyer coalition formation problem is an application of e-commerce and distributed agent technology. So far, most works in this topic are social utility based approaches, which assume the agents' utilities to be transferable and publicly known. However, such assumptions are not valid in many software agents applications where agents beliefs are private, and stability is often a more important concept than social utility. In this paper, we study the problem from a private-belief based non-transferable utility approach: instead of social utility maximization, our focus is on achieving stable solutions in term of the core, b-core and Pareto efficiency; instead of assuming common knowledge, we assume the agents' actions to be based on fallible private beliefs. We then propose a distributed mechanism where agents are allowed to propose incremental improvements toward a stable solution. We show by experiment that our mechanism is able to reach core stable solutions in over 97% of the cases, and b-core stable solution in almost of all cases that we tested.