Concise characteristic function representations in coalitional games based on agent types

Forming effective coalitions is a major research challenge in AI and multi-agent systems. Thus, coalitional games, including coalition structure generation, have been attracting considerable attention from the AI research community. Traditionally, the input of a coalitional game is a black-box function called a characteristic function. In this paper, we develop a new concise representation scheme for a characteristic function, which is based on the idea of agent types. This representation can be exponentially more concise than existing concise representation schemes. Furthermore, this idea can be used in conjunction with existing schemes to further reduce the representation size.