Equivalence and axiomatization of solutions for cooperative games with circular communication structure

We study cooperative games with transferable utility and limited cooperation possibilities. The focus is on communication structures where the set of players forms a circle, so that the possibilities of cooperation are represented by the connected sets of nodes of an undirected circular graph. Single-valued solutions are considered which are the average of specific marginal vectors. A marginal vector is deduced from a permutation on the player set and assigns as payoff to a player his marginal contribution when he joins his predecessors in the permutation. We compare the collection of all marginal vectors that are deduced from the permutations in which every player is connected to his immediate predecessor with the one deduced from the permutations in which every player is connected to at least one of his predecessors. The average of the first collection yields the average tree solution and the average of the second one is the Shapley value for augmenting systems. Although the two collections of marginal vectors are different and the second collection contains the first one, it turns out that both solutions coincide on the class of circular graph games. Further, an axiomatization of the solution is given using efficiency, linearity, some restricted dummy property, and some kind of symmetry

The core of games on k-regular set systems

In the classical setting of cooperative game theory, it is always assumed that all coalitions are feasible. However in many real situations, there are restrictions on the set of coalitions, for example duo to communication, order or hierarchy on the set of players, etc. There are already many works dealing with games on restricted set of coalitions, defining many different structures for the set of feasible coalitions, called set systems. We propose in this paper to consider k-regular set systems, that is, set systems having all maximal chains of the same length k. This is somehow related to communication graphs. We study in this perspective the core of games defined on k-regular set systems. We show that the core may be unbounded and without vertices in some situations.Cooperative game ; feasible coalition ; core

Structural restrictions in cooperation

Cooperative games with transferable utilities, or simply TU-games, refer to the situations where the revenues created by a coalition of players through cooperation can be freely distributed to the members of the coalition. The fundamental question in cooperative game theory deals with the problem of how much payoff every player should receive. The classical assumption for TU-games states that every coalition is able to form and earn the worth created by cooperation. In the literature, there are several different modifications of TU-games in order to cover the cases where cooperation among the players is restricted. The second chapter of this monograph provides a characterization of the average tree solution for TU-games where the restricted cooperation is represented by a connected cycle-free graph on the set of players. The third chapter considers TU-games for which the restricted cooperation is represented by a directed graph on the set of players and introduces the average covering tree solution and the dominance value for this class of games. Chapter four considers TU-games with restricted cooperation which is represented by a set system on the set of players and introduces the average coalitional tree solution for such structures. The last two chapters of this monograph belong to the social choice theory literature. Given a set of candidates and a set of an odd number of individuals with preferences on these candidates, pairwise majority comparison of the candidates yields a tournament on the set of candidates. Tournaments are special types of directed graphs which contain an arc between any pair of nodes. The Copeland solution of a tournament is the set of candidates that beat the maximum number of candidates. In chapter five, a new characterization of the Copeland solution is provided that is based on the number of steps in which candidates beat each other. Chapter six of this monograph is on preference aggregation which deals with collective decision making to obtain a social preference. A sophisticated social welfare function is defined as a mapping from profiles of individual preferences into a sophisticated social preference which is a pairwise weighted comparison of alternatives. This chapter provides a characterization of Pareto optimal and pairwise independent sophisticated social welfare functions

Axiomatizations of the Shapley value for games on augmenting systems

This paper deals with cooperative games in which only certain coalitions are allowed to form. There have been previous models developed to confront the problem of unallowable coalitions. Games restricted by a communication graph were introduced by Myerson and Owen. In their model, the feasible coalitions are those that induce connected subgraphs. Another type of model is introduced in Gilles, Owen and van den Brink. In their model, the possibilities of coalition formation are determined by the positions of the players in a so-called permission structure. Faigle proposed another model for cooperative games defined on lattice structures. We introduce a combinatorial structure called augmenting system which is a generalization of the antimatroid structure and the system of connected subgraphs of a graph. In this framework, the Shapley value of games on augmenting systems is introduced and two axiomatizations of this value are showed.Augmenting system Shapley value