Marginal Contribution Nets: A Compact Representation Scheme for Coalitional Games
- Samuel Ieong ,
- Yoav Shoham
ACM Electronic Commerce, Proceedings of ACM Electronic Commerce (ACM-EC) |
Published by Association for Computing Machinery, Inc.
We present a new approach to representing coalitional games based on rules that describe the marginal contributions of the agents. This representation scheme captures characteristics of the interactions among the agents in a natural and concise manner. We also develop efficient algorithms for two of the most important solution concepts, the Shapley value and the core, under this representation. The Shapley value can be computed in time linear in the size of the input. The emptiness of the core can be determined in time exponential only in the treewidth of a graphical interpretation of our representation.
Copyright © 2007 by the Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Publications Dept, ACM Inc., fax +1 (212) 869-0481, or permissions@acm.org. The definitive version of this paper can be found at ACM's Digital Library --http://www.acm.org/dl/.