Answers set programs for non-transferable utility games: Expressiveness, complexity and applications

摘要

Coalitional games are mathematical models suited to study payoff distribution problems in cooperative scenarios. In abstract terms, a coalitional game can be specified by explicitly listing all possible—in fact, exponentially many—coalitions with their associated distributions. This naïve representation, however, quickly becomes infeasible over games involving many agents, thereby calling for suitable compact representations, that is, encoding mechanisms that (on some specific classes of games of interest) take an amount of space that grows polynomially with the number of agents. To date, a plethora of compact encodings have been already introduced and analyzed from the algorithm and computational viewpoints. Despite their specific technical differences, these encodings typically share the assumption that the utility associated with a coalition can be freely transferred among agents. Indeed, designing encoding mechanisms for the non-transferable utility (NTU) setting is a research issue that has been largely unexplored so far.