Drawing upon and extending his inaugural Lipsey Lectures, Debraj Ray looks at coalition formation from the perspective of game theory. Ray brings together developments in both cooperative and noncooperative game theory to study the analytics of coalition formation and binding agreements.
Cooperative game theory is a branch of (micro-)economics that studies the behavior of self-interested agents in strategic settings where binding agreements among agents are possible. Our aim in this book is to present a survey of work on the computational aspects of cooperative game theory. We begin by formally defining transferable utility games in characteristic function form, and introducing key solution concepts such as the core and the Shapley value. We then discuss two major issues that arise when considering such games from a computational perspective: identifying compact representations for games, and the closely related problem of efficiently computing solution concepts for games. We survey several formalisms for cooperative games that have been proposed in the literature, including, for example, cooperative games defined on networks, as well as general compact representation schemes such as MC-nets and skill games. As a detailed case study, we consider weighted voting games: a widely-used and practically important class of cooperative games that inherently have a natural compact representation. We investigate the complexity of solution concepts for such games, and generalizations of them. We briefly discuss games with non-transferable utility and partition function games. We then overview algorithms for identifying welfare-maximizing coalition structures and methods used by rational agents to form coalitions (even under uncertainty), including bargaining algorithms. We conclude by considering some developing topics, applications, and future research directions.
This proceedings volume contains selected papers presented at the 2014 International Conference on Information Engineering and Education Science (ICIEES 2014), held June 12-13 in Hong Kong, China. The objective of ICIEES 2014 was to provide a platform for researchers, engineers, academics as well as industry professionals from all over the world to
The present book treats a highly specialized topic, namely effec tivity functions, which are a tool for describing the power structure implicit in social choice situations of various kind. One of the ad vantages of effectivity functions is that they seem to contain exactly the information which is needed in several problems of implementa tion, that is in designing the rules for individual behaviour given that this behaviour at equilibrium should result in a prescribed functional connection between preferences and outcome. We shall be interested in both formal properties of effectiv ity functions and applications of them in social choice theory, and among such applications in particular the implementation problem. This choice of emphasis necessarily means that some other topics are treated only superficially or not at all. We do not attempt to cover all contributions to the field, rather we try to put some of the results together in order to get a reasonably coherent theory about the role of the power structure in cooperative implementation. The authors are indebted to many persons for assistance and advice during the work on this book. In particular, we would like to thank Peter Fristrup and Bodil Hansen for critical reading of the manuscript, and Lene Petersen for typesetting in '.lEX.
The aim of this volume is to consider intertemporal and strategic issues in the formulation of economic policy so that dynamic game methodology is appropriate. When changes in economic policy are evaluated the reactions and expectations of other economic agents cannot be ignored, and in a dynamic setting issues like time inconsistency, subgame perfectness, reputation and information become important.The papers contained in this volume are the revised versions of those presented at a conference held in 1988 at Tilburg University, The Netherlands. They include methodological contributions and strategic analyses of macroeconomic policy, resource economics, international policy coordination and the arms race.
When Murat Sertel asked us whether we would be interested in organizing a special issue of the Review of Economic Design on the formation of networks and groups, we were happy to accept because of the growing research on this important topic. We were also pleasantly surprised at the response to our request for submissions to the special issue, receiving a much larger number of sub missions than we had anticipated. In the end we were able to put together two special issues of insightful papers on this topic. Given the growing interest in this topic, we also decided (with encouragement from Murat) to combine the special issues in the form of a book for wider dissemination. However, once we had decided to edit the book, it was natural to move beyond the special issue to include at least some of the papers that have been influential in the literature on the formation of networks. These papers were published in other journals, and we are very grateful to the authors as well as the journals for permission to include these papers in the book.
New Tools of Economic Dynamics gives an introduction and overview of recently developed methods and tools, most of them developed outside economics, to deal with the qualitative analysis of economic dynamics. It reports the results of a three-year research project by a European and Latin American network on the intersection of economics with mathematical, statistical, and computational methods and techniques. Focusing upon the evolution and manifold structure of complex dynamic phenomena, the book reviews and shows applications of a variety of tools, such as symbolic and coded dynamics, interacting agents models, microsimulation in econometrics, large-scale system analysis, and dynamical systems theory. It shows the potential of a comprehensive analysis of growth, fluctuations, and structural change along the lines indicated by pioneers like Harrod, Haavelmo, Hicks, Goodwin, Morishima, and it highlights the explanatory power of the qualitative approach they initiated.
An introduction to multiagent systems and contemporary distributed artificial intelligence, this text provides coverage of basic topics as well as closely-related ones. It emphasizes aspects of both theory and application and includes exercises of varying degrees of difficulty.