Bilkent University
Department of Computer Engineering
SEMINAR
A Journey Through Hedonic Games: Stability, Efficiency, and Computation
Dr. Buğra Çaşkurlu
New Uzbekistan University
Abstract: Hedonic games model coalition formation in settings where each agent cares only about the members of their own coalition. This talk surveys recent results on the existence and computation of stable and efficient coalition structures. Starting with hedonic games satisfying the common ranking property, I will present results showing how strong stability and Pareto efficiency can coexist and discuss the computational complexity of finding such outcomes. I will then extend these results to the broader classes of games satisfying the top-coalition and weak top-coalition properties, highlighting new polynomial-time algorithms, impossibility results, and recent parameterized complexity results that reveal the role of indifferences in coalition formation.
Biography: Buğra Çaşkurlu is Associate Dean of the School of Computing at New Uzbekistan University. He received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI). His research interests include algorithmic game theory, computational social choice, artificial intelligence, and algorithms, with recent work focusing on hedonic games. His research has appeared in conferences including IJCAI, AAMAS, ESA, SAGT, and GECCO, and in journals including Annals of Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, IEEE/ACM Transactions on Computer Networks, Theoretical Computer Science, Theory of Computing Systems and INFORMS Journal on Computing.
DATE: July 23, 2026 Thursday @ 13:30
Place: EA 516