  Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent systems. Coalitions enable
agents to achieve goals that they may not have been able to achieve on their
own. Previous work has shown problems in coalitional games to be
computationally hard. Wooldridge and Dunne (Artificial Intelligence 2006)
studied the classical computational complexity of several natural decision
problems in Coalitional Resource Games (CRG) - games in which each agent is
endowed with a set of resources and coalitions can bring about a set of goals
if they are collectively endowed with the necessary amount of resources. The
input of coalitional resource games bundles together several elements, e.g.,
the agent set Ag, the goal set G, the resource set R, etc. Shrot, Aumann and
Kraus (AAMAS 2009) examine coalition formation problems in the CRG model using
the theory of Parameterized Complexity. Their refined analysis shows that not
all parts of input act equal - some instances of the problem are indeed
tractable while others still remain intractable.
  We answer an important question left open by Shrot, Aumann and Kraus by
showing that the SC Problem (checking whether a Coalition is Successful) is
W[1]-hard when parameterized by the size of the coalition. Then via a single
theme of reduction from SC, we are able to show that various problems related
to resources, resource bounds and resource conflicts introduced by Wooldridge
et al are 1. W[1]-hard or co-W[1]-hard when parameterized by the size of the
coalition. 2. para-NP-hard or co-para-NP-hard when parameterized by |R|. 3. FPT
when parameterized by either |G| or |Ag|+|R|.
