Altruistic Hedonic Games

Abstract

Hedonic games are coalition formation games in which players have preferences over the coalitions they can join. For a long time, all models of representing hedonic games were based upon selfish players only. Among the known ways of representing hedonic games compactly, we focus on friend-oriented hedonic games and propose a novel model for them that takes into account not only the players’ own preferences but also their friends’ preferences. Depending on the order in which players look at their own or their friends’ preferences, we distinguish three degrees of altruism: selfish-first, equal-treatment, and altruistic-treatment preferences. We study both the axiomatic properties of these games and the computational complexity of problems related to various common stability concepts.