Stochastic Coalitional Game Theory

In my MAS class I am creating a stochastic normal-form game engine and one of the suggested elaborations is to look at coalitional  games.  So, I was like what if the coalition games were played in a stochastic game setting?

So what is that? Well based on these people at USC it is:

A real-world adversary is often a collection of distributed agents that must communicate and coordinate to enact a joint action and whose the [sic] motivations may not be perfectly aligned. This coordination in particular introduces new issues of stochasticity involving coalition structures, information uncertainty, imperfect execution and robustness.

So, it seems they took the location of the stochasticity further than just the games themselves, but to the robustness of the coalition structures as well.  This is one of their technical approaches to their research.  However, they seem to be the only ones looking at this type of game theory and they have not mentioned it in any of there papers that I can tell.

Swarm of text

Can we use the Shapley idea to determine if there is a swarm on twitter based on tweets?  A swarm could be thought as a lot of retweets or a tweet with similar words.  We could find old tweet swarms characterize them and use them to predict whether certain tweets will become swarms.  I think the idea is identifying whether a tweet will go viral.  When classifying we can look at the social network of the originators and the topic.  Then we can see which words are most frequent in the emerging swarm.  If pretweeting (stockmarket on the words in twitter) was still around we could make money :).

Is twitter and your (virality index) related to the success of crowd funded operations?  Or just that you know some rich people.

How to bring about a virtual swarm and influence it in your favor is an interesting topic.  Sounds like marketing though…