The paper deals with alliances and coalitions that can be formed by agents or entities. It is assumed that alliance agents cooperate and form coalitions for performing the tasks or missions. It is considered that alliance agents are unselfish. That is, they are more interested in achieving the common goal(s) than in getting personal benefits. In the paper, the concept of fuzzy alliance was introduced. A fuzzy alliance is considered as generalization of traditional alliance allowing agents to decide on the capabilities that their agents can and wanted deliver to coalition. Coalitions that can be formed by fuzzy alliance agents were considered. The definition of the “best” coalition was explained. The method of how to find the “best” coalition among all possible coalitions was suggested and verified by computer simulation.

Voting power methodology offers insights to understand coalition building in collective decision making. This paper proposes a new measure of voting power inspired from Banzhaf (1965) accounting for the proximity between voters by capturing how often they appear in winning coalitions together. Using this proximity index, we introduce a notion of relative linkages among coalition participants as determinant of coalition building. We propose an application to the governance structure of the International Monetary Fund, with linkages being represented by bilateral volumes of trade between voters. The results are able to explain several important features of the functioning of this particular voting body, and may be useful for other applications in international politics.

Cloud radio access network (C-RAN) has been proposed as a solution to reducing the huge cost of network upgrade while providing the spectral and energy efficiency needed for the new generation cellular networks. In order to reduce the interference that occur in C-RAN and maximize throughput, this paper proposes a sequentially distributed coalition formation (SDCF) game in which players, in this case the remote radio heads (RRHs), can sequentially join multiple coalitions to maximize their throughput. Contrary to overlapping coalition formation (OCF) game where players contribute fractions of their limited resources to different coalitions, the SDCF game offers better stability by allowing sequential coalition formation depending on the availability of resources and therefore providing a balance between efficient spectrum use and interference management. An algorithm for the proposed model is developed based on the merge-only method. The performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of stability, complexity and convergence to final coalition structure is also investigated. Simulation results show that the proposed SDCF game did not only maximize the throughput in the C-RAN, but it also shows better performances and larger capabilities to manage interference with increasing number of RRHs compared to existing methods.