Preference coalition formation algorithm for buyer coalition

Coalition stability is a major concept in coalition formation. One important problem in many stability concepts in n-person game theories is one assumption that the preference of each agent is publicly known. The coalition is said to be stable if there is no objections by any subset of agents according to the publicly known preference. Such assumption is contrastive with the situation of several software agent applications. Individual agents in the applications have private preferences and make a decision according to his/her preferences instead of common knowledge. This study proposes a novel preference coalition formation algorithm for a buyer coalition that attempts for unambiguous considering private preference of individual buyer within the buyer coalition process. The theoretical foundations of the study are rooted in the fields of multi criteria decision making, human practical reasoning, and n-person game theories. The existing literature on multi-criteria decision making, human practical reasoning, and n-person game theories were reviewed in order to determine an appropriate algorithm for the proposed buyer coalition framework with emphasis on private preference of individual buyer. For validation of the proposed algorithm, simulation software was developed to demonstrate results of a variety of simulations.