A strategy for multi-agent resource allocation under incomplete information

This paper tackles a distributed resource allocation among selfish and myopic agents for the redistribution of indivisible resources without side payment. Agents have divergent preferences among bundles of resources. Particularly, we address a negotiation strategy allowing an allocation with a good quality measured in term of social welfare. The aim is to obtain an allocation with near optimal social welfare (instead of an optimal one) since we don´t allow any money compensation. The negotiation model we use is one-to-one with resource swapping as a contract type which can involve more than one resource at a time. Moreover, the approach we propose involve without any privacy information revelation (preferences): an extreme case is addressed where an agent has to obtain a vital resource (present in more than one preferred bundles) without reveal its weak position. Experiments on large problem instances demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach.