Hedonic games are coalition formation games in which players have preferences over the coalitions they can join. For a long time, all models of representing hedonic games were based upon selfish players only. Among the known ways of representing hedonic games compactly, we focus on friend-oriented hedonic games and propose a novel model for them that takes into account not only the players’ own preferences but also their friends’ preferences. Depending on the order in which players look at their own or their friends’ preferences, we distinguish three degrees of altruism: selfish-first, equal-treatment, and altruistic-treatment preferences. We study both the axiomatic properties of these games and the computational complexity of problems related to various common stability concepts.

We propose a new representation setting for hedonic games, where each agent partitions the set of other agents into friends, enemies, and neutral agents, with friends and enemies being ranked. Under the assumption that preferences are monotonic (respectively, antimonotonic) with respect to the addition of friends (respectively, enemies), we propose a bipolar extension of the responsive extension principle, and use this principle to derive the (partial) preferences of agents over coalitions. Then, for a number of solution concepts, we characterize partitions that necessarily or possibly satisfy them, and we study the related problems in terms of their complexity.