A tractable and expressive class of marginal contribution nets and its applications

Coalitional games raise a number of important questions from the point of view of computer science, key among them being how to represent such games compactly, and how to efficiently compute solution concepts assuming such representations. Marginal contribution nets (MC-nets), introduced by Ieong and Shoham, are one of the simplest and most influential representation schemes for coalitional games. MCnets are a rule-based formalism, in which rules take the form pattern - value, where "pattern" is a Boolean condition over agents, and "value" is a numeric value. Ieong and Shoham showed that, for a class of what we will call "basic" MC-nets, where patterns are constrained to be a conjunction of literals, marginal contribution nets permit the easy computation of solution concepts such as the Shapley value. However, there are very natural classes of coalitional game that require an exponential number of such basic MC-net rules. We present read-once MC-nets, a n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Edith Elkind, Leslie Ann Goldberg, Paul W. Goldberg, Michael Wooldridge
• Keywords: ATAL 2008, Coalitional Games, Intelligent Agents, Marginal Contribution Nets, Solution Concepts