People Are Processors: Coalitional Auctions for Complex Projects

To successfully complete a complex project, be it a construction of an airport or of a backbone IT system, agents (companies or individuals) must form a team (a coalition) having required competences and resources. A team can be formed either by the client based on individual agents' offers (centralized formation); or by the agents themselves (decentralized formation) bidding for a project as a consortium-in that case many feasible teams compete for the employment contract. In these models, we investigate rational strategies of the agents (what salary should they ask? with whom should they team up?) under different organizations of the market. We propose concepts allowing to characterize the stability of the winning teams. We show that there may be no (rigorously) strongly winning coalition, but the weakly winning and the auction-winning coalitions are guaranteed to exist. In a general setting, with an oracle that decides whether a coalition is feasible, we show how to find the winning coalitions with a polynomial number of calls to the oracle. We also determine the complexity of the problem in a special case in which a project is a set of independent tasks. Each task must be processed by a single agent, but processing speeds differ between agents and tasks.