@InProceedings{goradia07b,
  author =	 {Hrishikesh J. Goradia and Jos\'{e} M. Vidal},
  title =	 {An Equal Excess Negotiation Algorithm for Coalition
                  Formation},
  booktitle =	 {Proceedings of the Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent
                  Systems Conference},
  year =	 2007,
  abstract =	 {Coalition formation is an important form of
                  interaction in multiagent systems. It enables the
                  agents to satisfy tasks that they would otherwise be
                  unable to perform, or would perform with a lower
                  efficiency. The focus of our work is on real-world
                  application domains where we have systems inhabited
                  by rational, self-interested agents. We also assume
                  an environment without any trusted central manager
                  to resolve issues concerning multiple agents. For
                  such environments, we have to determine both an
                  optimal (utility-maximizing) coalition configuration
                  and a stable payoff configuration, concurrently and
                  in a distributed fashion. Solving each of these
                  problems is known to be computationally expensive,
                  and having to consider them together exacerbates the
                  problem further. In this paper, we present our
                  Progressive, Anytime, Convergent, and Time-efficient
                  (PACT) algorithm for coalition formation to address
                  the above concerns. We assess the stability of the
                  resulting coalition by using a new stability
                  concept, the relaxed core, which is a slight
                  variation on the core. We show experimentally that
                  our algorithm performs admirably in comparison to an
                  optimal solution, it typically produces solutions
                  that are relaxed-core-stable, and it scales well.},
  comment = 	 {40\% acceptance rate.},
  cluster = 	 {10299263292880061076},
  url =		 {http://jmvidal.cse.sc.edu/papers/goradia07b.pdf}
}