An acyclic relation for comparison of bargaining powers of coalitions and its interrelationship with bargaining set

This paper proposes a method to compare bargaining power of coalitions within the framework of games in coalition form with transferable utility. The method is expressed by a relation on the set of all coalitions in a game, the relation which is defined based on the players’ bargaining power. It is shown in this paper that the newly defined relation satisfies acyclicity. Also, it is verified in this paper that the set of all individually rational payoff configurations under which all coalitions have the equal bargaining power coincides with the bargaining set. Some examples demonstrate how the newly proposed method works.