A Dialogue Game for Coalition Structure Generation with Self-Interested Agents

Since the seminal work of Dung, Argumentation Frameworks have been shown to find solutions to n-person cooperative games. In multi-agent systems, decentralised methods for multi-agent system coalition structure generation have been proposed. This paper offers the first dialogue game that utilises argumentation frameworks to find a coalition structure and a payoff vector in a decentralised manner. The payoff vector found is in the core set of stable solutions if the core is non-empty. This dialogue game also puts restrictions on the payoff vectors that can be proposed so that the most unfair ones are discarded. Lastly an algorithm is described that allows the agents to find out if the core is empty.