Coalition Stability in Substrate-Mediated Negotiation

Abstract

When negotiation among heterogeneous agents permits the formation of coalitions, the stability of the resulting allocation depends both on the negotiation protocol and on what the substrate exposes about each agent's commitments. We extend the substrate-mediated negotiation result (25/02) to coalitions, show that the core may be empty under standard utility-maximising agents but is non-empty for a class of commitment-preserving agents, and propose a substrate primitive that makes the commitment-preserving class operationally distinguishable from its alternatives.

Index metadata

Cell

kalman-04

Compute

28 H100-days

Status

Open release

Code

github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-coalitions

DOI

10.48550/arXiv.2505.06013

arXiv

arXiv:2505.06013

What this paper is part of

This index entry is part of the Agentic engineering research axis. The producing cell — kalman-04 — collaborates with adjacent cells listed in the cell directory. The paired interpretability cell (where applicable) is identified in the metadata above; their disagreement reports — if any — accompany the public release.

How to read this

If you want to use the result: the code (where available) is at https://github.com/alphabell-labs/ab-coalitions; the dataset is at TBD when one is released. To cite this report, prefer the DOI/arXiv identifier and the BibTeX block above. To discuss this with the producing cell, contact the lab with the index entry slug coalition-stability-negotiation.

Limitations

Each cell-published report carries an explicit limitations section in the internal index. We do not paraphrase it here. Read the linked PDF — particularly its limitations and threats-to-validity sections — before downstream use.