The selectope for cooperative games

The selectope of a cooperative transferable utility game is the convex hull of the payoff vectors obtained by assigning the Harsanyi dividends of the coalitions to members determined by so-called selectors. The selectope is studied from a set-theoretic point of view, as superset of the core and of the Weber set; and from a value-theoretic point of view, as containing weighted Shapley values, random order values, and sharing values. Received May 1997/Revised version September 1999     

The kernel of the composition of characteristic function games

The structure of the kernel of a composition of two games is investigated; a comparison with the results for Von-Neumann and Morgenstern solutions is included. The research described in this paper was partially supported by the U.S. Office of Naval Research under Contract Number N62558-4355.     

Dynamics of cooperative games

Systems of differential equations are exhibited, the solutions of which converge to optimal points, some of which are shown to coincide with classical solution concepts, to wit, the core, the Shapley value, and, under certain conditions, the Nucleolus.     

The nucleon of cooperative games and an algorithm for matching games

Thenucleon is introduced as a new allocation concept for non-negative cooperativen-person transferable utility games. The nucleon may be viewed as the multiplicative analogue of Schmeidler’s nucleolus. It is shown that the nucleon of (not necessarily bipartite) matching games can be computed in polynomial time.     

The reactive bargaining set for cooperative games

We introduce a new bargaining set for cooperative games in characteristic function form, and investigate its structure and properties. We prove that the new bargaining set is not empty. In fact, we show that it contains the kernel and is contained in the classical bargaining set ${\mathcal{M}^i_1}$ , and we further prove that it consists of the unique symmetric vector for the class of simple majority games.     

Strongly balanced cooperative games

Kaneko/Wooders (1982) derived a list of necessary and sufficient conditions for a partitioning game to have a nonempty core regardless of the payoff functions of its effective coalitions. The main purpose of our paper is to provide a graph-theoretical characterization of this family of games whose associated hypergraphs we callstrongly balanced: we show that the strong balancedness condition is equivalent to thenormality of the hypergraph, which is a type ofcoloring property (Lovasz (1972)). We also study interesting economic examples ofcommunication andassignment games and provide direct proofs that their associated hypergraphs are strongly balanced.We wish to thank two anonymous referees of this journal for their useful comments and suggestions. The previous version of this paper was written while the authors were visiting Department of Economics, University of Bonn. The financial support of Sonderfor-schungsbereich 303 is gratefully acknowledged.     

The values of information in some nonzero sum games

The paper considers nonzero-sum games in which the players' utility functions are not known with certainty. It tries to clarify the various definitions of information value in such games, provides the reader with a class of games with simple solutions, and presents experimental results corroborating the theoretical analysis.     

Extended cooperative networks games

We present here a pricing model which is an extension of the Cooperative Game concept and which includes a notion of Price-Dependent Demand. We present some existence results as well as some algorithms, and conclude by discussing a specific problem related to Network Pricing.     

Bargaining in cooperative games

This paper introduces a new solution concept for cooperative games without sidepayments, called the aspiration bargaining set, and proves that this set is nonempty for a wide, and economically interesting, class of games.     

Robust dynamic cooperative games

Classical cooperative game theory is no longer a suitable tool for those situations where the values of coalitions are not known with certainty. We consider a dynamic context where at each point in time the coalitional values are unknown but bounded by a polyhedron. However, the average value of each coalition in the long run is known with certainty. We design “robust” allocation rules for this context, which are allocation rules that keep the coalition excess bounded while guaranteeing each player a certain average allocation (over time). We also present a joint replenishment application to motivate our model. We thank two anonymous referees for their valuable comments.     

The kernel and bargaining set for convex games

It is shown that for convex games the bargaining set? ₁ ⁽ⁱ⁾ (for the grand coalition) coincides with the core. Moreover, it is proved that the kernel (for the grand coalition) of convex games consists of a unique point which coincides with the nucleolus of the game.     

Control-space properties of cooperative games

If two or more players agree to cooperate while playing a game, they help one another to minimize their respective costs as long as it is not to their individual disadvantages. This leads at once to the concept of undominated solutions to a game. Anundominated orPareto-optimal solution has the property that, compared to any other solution, at least one playerdoes worse or alldo the same if they use a solution other than the Pareto-optimal one.Closely related to the concept of a Pareto-optimal solution is theabsolutely cooperative solution. Such a solution has the property that, compared to any other permissible solution,every playerdoes no better if a solution other than the absolutely cooperative one is employed.This paper deals with control-space properties of Pareto-optimal and absolutely cooperative solutions for both static, continuous games and differential games. Conditions are given for cases in which solutions to the Pareto-optimal and absolutely cooperative games lie in the interior or on the boundary of the control set.The solution of a Pareto-optimal or absolutely cooperative game is related to the solution of a minimization problem with avector cost criterion. The question of whether or not a problem with a vector cost criterion can be reduced to a family of minimization problems with ascalar cost criterion is also discussed.An example is given to illustrate the theory.This research was supported in part by NASA Grant No. NGR-03-002-011 and ONR Contract No. N00014-69-A-0200-1020.     

Monotonic solutions of cooperative games

The principle of monotonicity for cooperative games states that if a game changes so that some player's contribution to all coalitions increases or stays the same then the player's allocation should not decrease. There is a unique symmetric and efficient solution concept that is monotonic in this most general sense — the Shapley value. Monotonicity thus provides a simple characterization of the value without resorting to the usual “additivity” and “dummy” assumptions, and lends support to the use of the value in applications where the underlying “game” is changing, e.g. in cost allocation problems.     

The kernel and the nucleolus of a product of simple games

The kernel and the nucleolus of a product of two simple games are given in terms of the kernels and the nucleoluses of the component games.     

The nucleolus and kernel of veto-rich transferable utility games

The process of computing the nucleolus of arbitrary transferable utility games is notoriously hard. A number of papers have appeared in which the nucleolus is computed by an algorithm in which either one or a huge number of huge linear programs have to be solved. We show that on the class of veto-rich games, the nucleolus is the unique kernel element. Veto-rich games are games in which one of the players is needed by coalitions in order to obtain a non-zero payoff. We then provide a fast algorithm which does not use linear programming techniques to compute the nucleolus of these games. Furthermore, we provide a few examples of economic situations which belong to the class of veto-rich games and which are treated in the literature.     

On the core of cooperative queueing games

We consider a class of cooperative games for managing several canonical queueing systems. When cooperating parties invest optimally in common capacity or choose the optimal amount of demand to serve, cooperation leads to “single-attribute” games whose characteristic function is embedded in a one-dimensional function. We show that when and only when the latter function is elastic will all embedded games have a non-empty core, and the core contains a population monotonic allocation. We present sufficient conditions for this property to be satisfied. Our analysis reveals that in most Erlang B and Erlang C queueing systems, the games under our consideration have a non-empty core, but there are exceptions, which we illustrate through a counterexample.