Preference Coalition Formation Scheme for Buyer Coalition Services with Bundles of Items

Abstract

Coalition stability is a major requirement in coalition formation. One important problem to achieve stability in n-person game theories is the assumption that the preference of each buyer is publicly known. The coalition is said to be stable if there are no objection by any subset of buyers according to their publicly known preferences. However, such assumption is often unrealistic in typical real-life situations. Individual buyers often have private preferences and make their decisions according to their own preferences instead. This study proposes a novel preference coalition formation scheme for buyer coalition services that attempts to consider private preference of individual buyers 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, from which we design an appropriate scheme for our proposed buyer coalition framework with emphasis on private preferences of individual buyers. The authors validate their proposed scheme with simulation software developed to demonstrate results of a variety of practical situations.