Belief Based Distributed Buyer Coalition Formation with Non-transferable Utility

Online buyer coalition formation problem is an application of e-commerce and distributed agent technology. So far, most works in this topic are social utility based approaches, which assume the agents´ utilities to be transferable and publicly known. However, such assumptions are not valid in many software agents applications where agents beliefs are private, and stability is often a more important concept than social utility. In this paper, we study the problem from a private-belief based non-transferable utility approach: instead of social utility maximization, our focus is on achieving stable solutions in term of the core, b-core and Pareto efficiency; instead of assuming common knowledge, we assume the agents´ actions to be based on fallible private beliefs. We then propose a distributed mechanism where agents are allowed to propose incremental improvements toward a stable solution. We show by experiment that our mechanism is able to reach core stable solutions in over 97% of the cases, and b-core stable solution in almost of all cases that we tested.