Shao Chin Sung

Simple Priorities and Core Stability in Hedonic Games

In this paper we study hedonic games where each player views every other player either as a friend or as an enemy. Two simple priority criteria for comparison of coalitions are suggested, and the corresponding preference restrictions based on appreciation of friends and aversion to enemies are considered. We characterize internally stable coalitions on the proposed domains and show how these characterizations can be used for generating a strict core element in the first case and a core element in the second case. Moreover, we prove that an element of the strict core under friends appreciation can be found in polynomial time, while finding an element of the core under enemies aversion is NP-hard.

Computational Complexity in Additive Hedonic Games

We investigate the computational complexity of several decision problems in hedonic coalition formation games and demonstrate that attaining stability in such games remains NP-hard even when they are additive. Precisely, we prove that when either core stability or strict core stability is under consideration, the existence problem of a stable coalition structure is NP-hard in the strong sense. Furthermore, the corresponding decision problems with respect to the existence of a Nash stable coalition structure and of an individually stable coalition structure turn out to be NP-complete in the strong sense.

Procedural group identification

In this paper we axiomatically characterize two recursive procedures for defining a social group. The first procedure starts with the set of all individuals who are defined by everyone in the society as group members, while the starting point of the second procedure is the set of all individuals who define themselves as members of the social group. Both procedures expand these initial sets by adding individuals who are considered to be appropriate group members by someone in the corresponding initial set, and continue inductively until there is no possibility of expansion any more.

A Taxonomy of Myopic Stability Concepts for Hedonic Games

We present a taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games in terms of deviations, and discuss the status of the existence problems of stable coalition structures. In particular, we show that contractual strictly core stable coalition structures always exist, and provide sufficient conditions for the existence of contractually Nash stable and weak individually stable coalition structures on the class of separable games.

Size Monotonicity and Stability of the Core in Hedonic Games

We show that the core of each strongly size monotonic hedonic game is not empty and is externally stable. This is in sharp contrast to other sufficient conditions for core non-emptiness which do not even guarantee the existence of a stable set in such games.