A Mechanism for Forming Long-Term Coalitions of Customer and Vendor Personal Agents

Contents

Recently coalition formation has been explored in the area of electronic marketplace as temporary buying groups. We extend this concept to long-term coalitions that are formed of both customer and vendor agents after evaluating their relationships with other agents in the system. We propose a coalition formation mechanism designed at microscopic (agent) level as a decision problem and we analyze the effect of this mechanism at both microscopic and macroscopic (system) levels. Our results show that forming coalitions is beneficial for both the system (it reaches an equilibrium state) and for the agents (they have high gain increase over time).