hedoniccoalitionformationgames.pdf

Institute of Mathematical Economics Working Papers 374 November 2005 On Core Membership Testing for Hedonic Coalition Formation Games Shao Chin Sung and Dinko Dimitrov IMW · Bielefeld University Postfach 100131 33501 Bielefeld · Germany email: imw@wiwi.uni-bielefeld.de http://www.wiwi.uni-bielefeld.de/?imw/Papers/showpaper.php?374 ISSN: 0931-6558 On core membership testing for hedonic coalition formation games Shao Chin Sung Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Aoyama Gakuin University 5-10-1 Fuchinobe, Sagamihara City, Kanagawa, 229-8551, Japan Email: son@ise.aoyama.ac.jp Dinko Dimitrov Institute of Mathematical Economics Bielefeld University P.O. Box 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany Email: d.dimitrov@wiwi.uni-bielefeld.de November 21, 2005 Abstract We are concerned with the problem of core membership testing for hedonic coalition formation games, which is to decide whether a certain coalition structure belongs to the core of a given game. We show that this problem is co-NP complete when players?preferences are additive. JEL Classi?cation : C71, C63. Keywords : additivity, coalition formation, core, co-NP completeness, hedonic games. Corresponding author. 1 1 Introduction The study of computational complexity in hedonic coalition formation games, or simply hedonic games, has a short history, although these issues in coopera- tive and non-cooperative game theory are being gradually recognized. Maybe the reason is that the formal model of a hedonic game was only recently in- troduced (cf. Banerjee, Konishi, and S?nmez (2001) and Bogomolnaia and Jackson (2002)). This model consist of a ?nite set of players and a preference relation for each player de?ned over the set of all coalitions containing the corresponding player. The outcome of a hedonic game is a coalition structure (i.e., a partition of the set of players into coalitions). A coalition structure is called stable if there is no group of individuals who can all be better o¤ by forming a new deviat