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In many (social, economic, and political) strategic situations, conflict and cooperations coexist and group (or coalitional) behavior is as important as individual behavior. This dissertation studies several issues in such situations. / Chapter 1 provides an overview of the theoretical background and motivates the analysis undertaken. / Chapter 2 analyzes strategic situations with diverse coalitional interactions to ascertain the "stable" outcomes that will not be replaced by any rational (hence farsighted) coalition of individuals, and the coalitions that are likely to form. The analysis takes into full account the perfect foresight of rational individuals, which has been overlooked in the literature. / Chapter 3 defines "negotiation-proof Nash equilibrium", a notion that applies to environments where players can negotiate openly and directly prior to the play of a noncooperative game. The merit of the notion of negotiation-proof Nash equilibrium is twofold: (1) It resolves the nestedness and myopia embedded in the notion of coalition-proof Nash equilibrium. (2) The negotiation process, which is formalized by a "graph", serves as a natural alternative to the approach that models pre-play communication by an extensive form game. / Chapter 4 examines the notion of "renegotiation-proofness" in infinitely repeated games. It is shown that imposing renegotiation in all contingencies creates both conceptual and technical difficulties. A notion of self-enforcing agreements is offered: an agreement is self-enforcing if it is immune to any deviation by any coalition which cannot (confidently) count on renegotiation.

Coalition stability is an important concept in coalition formation. One common assumption in many stability criteria in non-transferable utility games is that the preference relations of each agent is publicly known so that a coalition is said to be stable if there is no objection by any sub-group of agents according to the publicly known preferences. / However, in many software agent applications, this assumption is not true. Instead, agents are modeled as individuals with private belief and decisions are made according to those beliefs instead of common knowledge. There are two types of uncertainty here. First, uncertainty in beliefs regarding the environment means that agents are also uncertain about their preferences. Second, an agent's actions can be influenced by his belief regarding other agents' preferences. Such uncertainties have impacts on the coalition's stability which is not reflected in the current stability criteria. / In this thesis, we extend the classic stability concept of the non-transferable utility core by proposing new belief based stability criteria under uncertainty, and illustrate how the new concept can be used to analyze the stability of a new type of belief-based coalition formation game. Mechanisms for reaching solutions of the new stable criteria is proposed and a real life application example is studied. / Chan, Chi Kong. / Adviser: Ho-Fung Leung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 70-06, Section: B, page: 3594. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2008. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 101-103). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [200-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / School code: 1307.

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