Consistency, converse consistency, and aspirations in TU-games

In problems of choosing ‘aspirations’ for TU-games, we study two axioms, ‘MW-consistency’ and ‘converse MW-consistency.’ In particular, we study which subsolutions of the aspiration correspondence satisfy MW-consistency and/or converse MW-consistency. We also provide axiomatic characterizations of the aspiration kernel and the aspiration nucleolus

Demand commitment bargaining: The case of apex games

Game Theory

Mechanism Design for Team Formation

Team formation is a core problem in AI. Remarkably, little prior work has addressed the problem of mechanism design for team formation, accounting for the need to elicit agents' preferences over potential teammates. Coalition formation in the related hedonic games has received much attention, but only from the perspective of coalition stability, with little emphasis on the mechanism design objectives of true preference elicitation, social welfare, and equity. We present the first formal mechanism design framework for team formation, building on recent combinatorial matching market design literature. We exhibit four mechanisms for this problem, two novel, two simple extensions of known mechanisms from other domains. Two of these (one new, one known) have desirable theoretical properties. However, we use extensive experiments to show our second novel mechanism, despite having no theoretical guarantees, empirically achieves good incentive compatibility, welfare, and fairness.Comment: 12 page

With a Little Help from My Friends: Ministerial Alignment and Public Spending Composition in Parliamentary Democracies. LEQS Paper No. 133/2018 April 2018

The determinants of public spending composition have been studied from three broad perspectives in the scholarly literature: functional economic pressures, institutional constraints and party-political determinants. This paper engages with the third perspective by placing intra-governmental dynamics in the center of the analysis. Building on the portfolio allocation approach in the coalition formation literature and the common pool perspective in public budgeting, I argue that spending ministers with party-political backing from the Finance Minister or the Prime Minister are in a privileged positon to obtain extra funding for their policy jurisdictions compared to their colleagues without such support or without any partisan affiliation (non-partisan ministers). I test these propositions via a system of equations on six spending categories using seemingly unrelated regressions on a panel of 32 parliamentary democracies over two decades and offer largely supportive empirical evidence. With the exception of education, I provide evidence that budget shares accruing to key spending departments reflect this party-political logic of spending outcomes. In addition to the econometric results, I also illustrate the impact of ministerial alignment by short qualitative accounts from selected country cases

Formation of coalition structures as a non-cooperative game

Traditionally social sciences are interested in structuring people in multiple groups based on their individual preferences. This pa- per suggests an approach to this problem in the framework of a non- cooperative game theory. Definition of a suggested finite game includes a family of nested simultaneous non-cooperative finite games with intra- and inter-coalition externalities. In this family, games differ by the size of maximum coalition, partitions and by coalition structure formation rules. A result of every game consists of partition of players into coalitions and a payoff? profiles for every player. Every game in the family has an equilibrium in mixed strategies with possibly more than one coalition. The results of the game differ from those conventionally discussed in cooperative game theory, e.g. the Shapley value, strong Nash, coalition-proof equilibrium, core, kernel, nucleolus. We discuss the following applications of the new game: cooperation as an allocation in one coalition, Bayesian games, stochastic games and construction of a non-cooperative criterion of coalition structure stability for studying focal points.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1612.02344, arXiv:1612.0374

The Prediction value

We introduce the prediction value (PV) as a measure of players' informational importance in probabilistic TU games. The latter combine a standard TU game and a probability distribution over the set of coalitions. Player $i$'s prediction value equals the difference between the conditional expectations of $v(S)$ when $i$ cooperates or not. We characterize the prediction value as a special member of the class of (extended) values which satisfy anonymity, linearity and a consistency property. Every $n$-player binomial semivalue coincides with the PV for a particular family of probability distributions over coalitions. The PV can thus be regarded as a power index in specific cases. Conversely, some semivalues -- including the Banzhaf but not the Shapley value -- can be interpreted in terms of informational importance.Comment: 26 pages, 2 table

Unions against governments: explaining general strikes in Western Europe, 1980-2006

Across Western Europe, unions have increasingly engaged in staging general strikes against governments since 1980. This increase in general strikes is puzzling as it has occurred at the same time as economic strikes have been on the decline. We posit that theories developed to explain economic strikes hold little explanatory power in accounting for variation in general strikes across countries and over time. Instead, we develop a framework based on political variables; in particular, whether governments have included or excluded unions in framing policy reforms; the party position of the government; and the type of government. Our empirical analysis, based on a conditional fixed-effects logit estimation of 84 general strikes between 1980 and 2006, shows that union exclusion from the process of reforming policies, government strength, and the party position of the government can provide an initial explanation for the occurrence of general strikes

Aggregation and Representation in the European Parliament Party Groups

While members of the European Parliament are elected in national constituencies, their votes are determined by the aggregation of MEPs in multinational party groups. The uncoordinated aggregation of national party programmes in multinational EP party groups challenges theories of representation based on national parties and parliaments. This article provides a theoretical means of understanding representation by linking the aggregation of dozens of national party programmes in different EP party groups to the aggregation of groups to produce the parliamentary majority needed to enact policies. Drawing on an original data source of national party programmes, the EU Profiler, the article shows that the EP majorities created by aggregating MEP votes in party groups are best explained by cartel theories. These give priority to strengthening the EP’s collective capacity to enact policies rather than voting in accord with the programmes they were nationally elected to represent