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First World Congress of the Game Theory Society (Games 2000)
July 24-28, 2000
Basque Country University and Fundacion B.B.V.
Bilbao, Spain

Organizers
Ehud Kalai, Federico Valenciano

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Coalition Formation Games with Separable Preferences
by
Nadia Burani
Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona
Coauthors: William Zwicker (Union College)

We provide sufficient conditions for the existence of stable coalitional structures in a purely hedonic game, i.e. in a coalition formation game such that players' preferences over coalitions are completely determined by the members of the coalition they belong to. First, we show that the existence of core stable and Nash stable solutions for the game depends on certain vector decompositions of the utility functions representing additively separable and symmetric preferences.

Then, we generalize the results obtained and show that equilibria with the same qualitative features exist under much weaker restrictions on agents' preferences.

Finally, we examine the relationships between the properties we introduced and other conditions guaranteeing the existence of stable partitions, which are already known in the literature.

Date received: May 28, 2000

Copyright © 2000 by the author(s). The author(s) of this document and the organizers of the conference have granted their consent to include this abstract in Atlas Conferences Inc. Document # cafc-71.