Local Search Algorithms for Core Checking in Hedonic Coalition Games

Hedonic games have emerged as an important tool in economics and show promise as a, useful formalism to model multi-agent coalition formation in AI as well as group formation in social networks. We consider a, coNP-complete problem of core membership checking in hedonic coalition Formation games. No previous algorithms to tackle the problem have been presented. In this work, we overcome this by developing two stochastic local search algorithms for core membership checking in hedonic games. We demonstrate the usefulness of the algorithms by showing experimentally that they find solutions efficiently, particularly for large agent societies.