Hedonic Games

Abstract

Coalitions are a central part of economic, political, and social life, and coalition formation has been studied extensively within the mathematical social sciences. Agents (be they humans, robots, or software agents) have preferences over coalitions and, based on these preferences, it is natural to ask which coalitions are expected to form, and which coalition structures are better social outcomes. In this chapter, we consider coalition formation games with hedonic preferences, or simply hedonic games. The outcome of a coalition formation game is a partitioning of the agents into disjoint coalitions, which we will refer to synonymously as a partition or coalition structure.