The Rise and Fall of Complex Family Structures: Coalition Formation, Stability, and Power Struggle

A complex family is a particular case of animal family structures that arises from cooperative breeding. This paper studies the problem of complex family formation from a game-theoretical perspective and proposes a characteristic function coalitional game. We investigate the stability of coalitions and provide theoretical bounds on the existence of complex families and the size of coalitions. Furthermore, we empirically examine the proposed framework and show that our results are consistent with the observed coalition formations, shedding light on the family compositions in the past.