Simulating the Impact of Trust in Coalition Formation: A Preliminary Analysis

In multiagent systems, agents may cooperate in order to achieve their goals. One possible form of cooperation is through coalition formation. Assuming that agents are selfish, or potentially unreliable, they should implement some mechanism to deal with the uncertainty arising from the cooperation. One possibility is the use of the trust notion, which provides a mechanism for modeling and reasoning on agents' reliability. Hence, this work presents an agent-based simulation experiment that consists of agents who play the spatial prisoner's dilemma game with coalition formation, and analyzes how the trust notion influences the coalition dynamics.