Balancedness Conditions for Exact Games

We provide two new characterizations of exact games. First, a game is exact if and only if it is exactly balanced; and second, a game is exact if and only if it is totally balanced and overbalanced. The condition of exact balancedness is identical to the one of balancedness, except that one of the balancing weights may be negative while for overbalancedness one of the balancing weights is required to be non-positive and no weight is put on the grand coalition. Exact balancedness and overbalancedness are both easy to formulate conditions with a natural game-theoretic interpretation and are shown to be useful in applications. Using exact balancedness we show that exact games are convex for the grand coalition and that the classes of convex and totally exact games coincide. We provide an example of a game that is totally balanced and convex for the grand coalition, but not exact. Finally we relate classes of balanced, totally balanced, convex for the grand coalition, exact, totally exact, and convex games to one another.operations research and management science;

The Epsilon Core of a Large Game

Sufficient conditions are given for large replica games without side payments to have non-empty approximate cores for all sufficiently large replications. No “balancedness” assumptions are required. The conditions are superadditivity, a very weak boundedness condition, and convexity of the payoff sets. An example is provided to show that under these conditions, the (exact) core well may be empty

Minimal exact balancedness

To verify whether a transferable utility game is exact, one has to check a linear inequalityfor each exact balanced collection of coalitions. This paper studies the structure andproperties of the class of exact balanced collections. Comparing the definition of exactbalanced collections with the definition of balanced collections, the weight vector of abalanced collection must be positive whereas the weight vector for an exact balancedcollection may contain one negative weight. We investigate minimal exact balanced collections, and show that only these collections are needed to obtain exactness. The relation between minimality of an exact balanced collection and uniqueness of the corresponding weight vector is analyzed. We show how the class of minimal exact balanced collections can be partitioned into three basic types each of which can be systematically generated.operations research and management science;

Algebraic duality theorems for infinite LP problems

In this paper we consider a primal-dual infinite linear programming problem-pair, i.e. LPs on infinite dimensional spaces with infinitely many constraints. We present two duality theorems for the problem-pair: a weak and a strong duality theorem. We do not assume any topology on the vector spaces, therefore our results are algebraic duality theorems. As an application, we consider transferable utility cooperative games with arbitrarily many players

Minimal Exact Balancedness

To verify whether a transferable utility game is exact, one has to check a linear inequality for each exact balanced collection of coalitions. This paper studies the structure and properties of the class of exact balanced collections. Comparing the definition of exact balanced collections with the definition of balanced collections, the weight vector of a balanced collection must be positive whereas the weight vector for an exact balanced collection may contain one negative weight. We investigate minimal exact balanced collections, and show that only these collections are needed to obtain exactness. The relation between minimality of an exact balanced collection and uniqueness of the corresponding weight vector is analyzed. We show how the class of minimal exact balanced collections can be partitioned into three basic types each of which can be systematically generated.Cooperative games;exact games;exact balanced collections

Cores of Cooperative Games in Information Theory

Cores of cooperative games are ubiquitous in information theory, and arise most frequently in the characterization of fundamental limits in various scenarios involving multiple users. Examples include classical settings in network information theory such as Slepian-Wolf source coding and multiple access channels, classical settings in statistics such as robust hypothesis testing, and new settings at the intersection of networking and statistics such as distributed estimation problems for sensor networks. Cooperative game theory allows one to understand aspects of all of these problems from a fresh and unifying perspective that treats users as players in a game, sometimes leading to new insights. At the heart of these analyses are fundamental dualities that have been long studied in the context of cooperative games; for information theoretic purposes, these are dualities between information inequalities on the one hand and properties of rate, capacity or other resource allocation regions on the other.Comment: 12 pages, published at http://www.hindawi.com/GetArticle.aspx?doi=10.1155/2008/318704 in EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking, Special Issue on "Theory and Applications in Multiuser/Multiterminal Communications", April 200

Stable Allocations of Risk

The measurement and the allocation of risk are fundamental problems of portfolio management. Coherent measures of risk provide an axiomatic approach to the former problem. In an environment given by a coherent measure of risk and the various portfolios’ realization vectors, risk allocation games aim at solving the second problem: How to distribute the diversification benefits of the various portfolios? Understanding these cooperative games helps us to find stable, efficient, and fair allocations of risk. We show that the class of risk allocation and totally balanced games coincide hence a stable allocation of risk is always possible. When the aggregate portfolio is riskless: risk is limited to subportfolios, the class of risk allocation games coincides with the class of exact games. As in exact games any subcoalition may be subject to marginalization even in core allocations, our result further emphasizes the responsibility in allocating risk.microeconomics ;

Stable Allocations of Risk

Measuring risk can be axiomatized by the concept of coherent measures of risk. A risk environment specifies some individual portfolios' realization vectors and a coherent measure of risk. We consider sharing the risk of the aggregate portfolio by studying transferable utility cooperative games: risk allocation games. We show that the class of risk allocation games coincides with the class of totally balanced games. As a limit case the aggregate portfolio can have the same payoff in all states of nature. We prove that the class of risk allocation games with no aggregate uncertainty coincides with the class of exact games.Coherent Measures of Risk, Risk Allocation Games, Totally Balanced Games, Exact Games