FEN-Hedonic Games with Distance-Based Preferences

Abstract: Hedonic games formalize coalition formation scenarios where players evaluate an outcome based on the coalition they are contained in. Due to a large number of possible coalitions, compact representations of these games are crucial. We complement known compact representation models by a distance-based approach: Players' preferences are encoded in a bipolar manner by ordinal preferences over a small set of known neighbouring players, coalitions are represented by adequate preference orders from a player's perspective, and preferences over coalitions are extended based on a directed form of Hausdorff-Kendall-tau distance between individual preferences and coalitions. We show that this model satisfies desirable axiomatic properties and has reasonable computational complexity in terms of selected individual-based stability notions.