Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2015)

Simple Causes of Complexity in Hedonic Games

Dominik Peters and Edith Elkind Department of Computer Science University of Oxford, UK {dominik.peters, edith.elkind}@cs.ox.ac.uk

Abstract SNSSCRCRNSIS Hedonic games provide a natural model of coali- IRCL of length 6 9 NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. NP-c. NP-c. tion formation among self-interested agents. The Hedonic Coalition Nets NP-h. NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. associated problem of finding stable outcomes in such games has been extensively studied. In this W-preferences (no ties) (P) (P) NP-c. NP-c. paper, we identify simple conditions on expressivity W-preferences NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. NP-c. of hedonic games that are sufficient for the problem WB-preferences (no ties) (P) (P) NP-c. NP-c. of checking whether a given game admits a stable WB-preferences NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. NP-c. outcome to be computationally hard. Somewhat B- & W-hedonic games NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. surprisingly, these conditions are very mild and in- tuitive. Our results apply to a wide range of stability Additively separable NP-h. NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. concepts ( stability, individual stability, Nash Fractional hedonic games NP-h. NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. stability, etc.) and to many known formalisms for Social FHGs NP-h. NP-h. (+) (+) hedonic games (additively separable games, games Median NP-h. NP-h. with W-preferences, fractional hedonic games, etc.), Midrange ( 1 B + 1 W) NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. and unify and extend known results for these for- 2 2 4-Approval NP-h. NP-h. NP-h. NP-c. NP-c. malisms. They also have broader applicability: for several classes of hedonic games whose computa- tional complexity has not been explored in prior Table 1: Some of the hardness results implied by our framework work, we show that our framework immediately im- for the problem of identifying hedonic games with stable outcomes. Gray entries are results that have not appeared in the literature before. plies a number of hardness results for them. (P) indicates known polynomial-time algorithms, (+) means that a stable outcome always exists. See Section 6 for details. 1 Introduction Hedonic games [Dreze` and Greenberg, 1980; Banerjee et al., formalisms for hedonic games, i.e., ones where a game de- 2001; Bogomolnaia and Jackson, 2002] provide an elegant scription size scales polynomially with the number of agents n. and versatile model of coalition formation among strategic Typically, such formalisms are not universally expressive, but agents. In such games, each agent has preferences over coali- capture important classes of hedonic games. For instance, if tions (subsets of players) that she can be a part of, and an the that an agent assigns to a coalition is given by the outcome of the game is a partition of agents into coalitions. sum/average/minimum/maximum of the she assigns to Clearly, the quality of an outcome depends on how well it individual members of that coalition, the entire game can be de- reflects the agents’ preferences. In particular, it is desirable to scribed by n(n−1) numbers (such games are known as, respec- have outcomes that are stable, i.e., do not offer the agents an tively, additively separable games [Bogomolnaia and Jackson, opportunity to profitably deviate. Many different concepts of 2002], fractional hedonic games [Aziz et al., 2014], and games stability have been proposed in the hedonic games literature with W- and B-preferences [Cechlarov´ a´ and Hajdukova,´ 2003; (see Section 2 for a brief summary, and [Aziz and Savani, 2004b]). There are also representation formalisms that are 2015] for an in-depth discussion), and for each of them a natu- universally expressive (and hence exponentially verbose in ral computational question is whether a given game admits an the worst case), but provide succinct descriptions of hedo- outcome that is stable in that sense. nic games that have certain structural properties; examples The complexity of this question depends on how the game include Individually Rational Coalition Lists [Ballester, 2004] is represented: while every hedonic game can be described and Hedonic Coalition Nets [Elkind and Wooldridge, 2009]. by explicitly listing each agent’s relation over all The complexity of stability-related problems under these and coalitions that may contain her, in recent years there has been other representations for hedonic games has been investigated a considerable amount of research on succinct representation by a number of researchers (see [Woeginger, 2013a] for a sur-

617 vey); with a few exceptions, checking whether a game admits disjoint coalitions. We write π(i) for the coalition of π that 0 0 a stable outcome turns out to be computationally hard. contains i. For partitions π and π , we write π