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[2602.05888] Metric Hedonic Games on the Line
Summary
The paper explores Metric Hedonic Games, focusing on coalition formation among agents based on their utility and costs related to coalition membership, revealing insights into stability and coalition properties.
Why It Matters
Understanding the dynamics of coalition formation in strategic settings has implications for various fields, including economics, political science, and AI. This research extends existing models, providing a framework to analyze coalition stability and efficiency, which can inform decision-making in competitive environments.
Key Takeaways
- Introduces a novel variant of hedonic games with succinct utility representations.
- Investigates coalition stability and properties using distance-based cost models.
- Finds that stable coalition structures exist but vary in quality and properties.
- Explores implications of limiting coalition sizes and numbers.
- Highlights counter-intuitive behaviors in coalition dynamics.
Computer Science > Computer Science and Game Theory arXiv:2602.05888 (cs) [Submitted on 5 Feb 2026 (v1), last revised 16 Feb 2026 (this version, v2)] Title:Metric Hedonic Games on the Line Authors:Merlin de la Haye, Pascal Lenzner, Farehe Soheil, Marcus Wunderlich View a PDF of the paper titled Metric Hedonic Games on the Line, by Merlin de la Haye and 3 other authors View PDF Abstract:Hedonic games are fundamental models for investigating the formation of coalitions among a set of strategic agents, where every agent has a certain utility for every possible coalition of agents it can be part of. To avoid the intractability of defining exponentially many utilities for all possible coalitions, many variants with succinct representations of the agents' utility functions have been devised and analyzed, e.g., modified fractional hedonic games by Monaco et al. [JAAMAS 2020]. We extend this by studying a novel succinct variant that is related to modified fractional hedonic games. In our model, each agent has a fixed type-value and an agent's cost for some given coalition is based on the differences between its value and those of the other members of its coalition. This allows to model natural situations like athletes forming training groups with similar performance levels or voters that partition themselves along a political spectrum. In particular, we investigate natural variants where an agent's cost is defined by distance thresholds, or by the maximum or average value differen...
