A Practical Negotiation-Based Team Formation Model for Non-cooperative Social Networks

Team formation is an effective collaboration manner in social networks (SNs). Within teams, social individuals can work together to accomplish complex jobs that they are unable to perform individually. Due to its wide range of applications, team formation in SNs has been studied extensively and a number of approaches have been proposed. However, all of these proposals either build teams of individuals to accomplish jobs through a centralized manner or ignore the selfish nature of social individuals, or both. In this paper, we introduce a decentralized negotiation-based team formation model for non-cooperative SNs, where social individuals are self-interested. The proposed team formation model works by allowing the employer (i.e., Job initiator) to recruit a team of professional employees that demand small working remuneration and incur little communication overhead and allowing the employees to join the beneficial teams from which they can achieve a high financial remuneration. The simulation results show that our model achieves about 80% social welfare of the ideal centralized models on average. Moreover, compared to other conventional distributed models, our model can reduce team formation time significantly, making our model a better choice for the real-world time-sensitive applications.