February 27, 2026, Webb Hall 1100

Cooperative games model strategic settings in which agents coordinate to form partnerships and share payoffs to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes. These settings range from two-sided matchings to larger groups forming coalitions. A stable outcome is where no subgroup of agents has an incentive to break away to form a separate partnership. Stable outcomes, when they exist, can be computed in a centralized manner, where a single entity has full information about the underlying setup and full authority to assign partnerships and payoffs. Here, we present distributed dynamics where agents both form and break partnerships according to evolving internal aspiration levels that reflect self-interest. Our distributed dynamics require simple computations, limited memory, and most importantly, minimal knowledge of the environment. We establish that these dynamics converge to stable outcomes analogous to the core and present a variety of computational experiments.

Aya Hamed is a postdoctoral scholar in the ECE Department at UCSB, working with Jason R. Marden. She earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, advised by Jeff S. Shamma. Prior to that, she received a Master of Advanced Study in Mathematics at the University of Cambridge and a B.S. in Physics and Mathematics from the American University in Cairo. Her research focuses on game-theoretic analysis and mechanism design for multi-agent systems in both cooperative and non-cooperative settings, with an emphasis on how bounded rationality, behavioral factors, and information constraints shape strategic decision-making.