Today I read a paper titled “Mechanism Design for Team Formation”
The abstract is:
Team formation is a core problem in AI
Remarkably, little prior work has addressed the problem of mechanism design for team formation, accounting for the need to elicit agents’ preferences over potential teammates
Coalition formation in the related hedonic games has received much attention, but only from the perspective of coalition stability, with little emphasis on the mechanism design objectives of true preference elicitation, social welfare, and equity
We present the first formal mechanism design framework for team formation, building on recent combinatorial matching market design literature
We exhibit four mechanisms for this problem, two novel, two simple extensions of known mechanisms from other domains
Two of these (one new, one known) have desirable theoretical properties
However, we use extensive experiments to show our second novel mechanism, despite having no theoretical guarantees, empirically achieves good incentive compatibility, welfare, and fairness.