Abstract
We propose a new class of allocation rules for cooperative games with transferable utility (TU-games), weighted-egalitarian Shapley values, where each rule in this class takes into account each player’s contributions and heterogeneity among players to determine each player’s allocation. We provide an axiomatic foundation for the rules with a given weight profile (i.e., exogenous weights) and the class of rules (i.e., endogenous weights). The axiomatization results illustrate the differences among our class of rules, the Shapley value, the egalitarian Shapley values, and the weighted Shapley values.
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Notes
Weak monotonicity without weights was introduced by van den Brink et al. (2013) to characterize egalitarian Shapley values. We discuss this topic later.
In Sect. 5, we discuss the future direction to unify these two classes.
This is also known as the equal treatment property.
Note that (WDMSP) is weaker than (SYM). It is also a weaker version of differential marginality defined by Casajus (2010, 2011). Formally, differential marginality is defined as follows: for any \(i,j \in N\) and \(v, v' \in \mathcal {G}\), if \(v(S \cup \{i\})-v(S \cup \{j\}) \)\(= v'(S \cup \{i\})-v'(S \cup \{j\})\) for all \(S \subseteq N{\setminus }\{i,j\}\), then \(f_i(v)-f_j(v)=f_i(v')-f_j(v')\).
A game v is monotonic if \(v(T) \ge v(S)\) for any \(S \subseteq T\).
This is a corollary implied by their more general result. They consider more general weight systems.
If \(f_i(\mathbf 0 )=\delta <0\) for all \(i \in N\), it contradicts to (E). Hence, supposing that \(f_i(\mathbf 0 )=\delta >0\) for some i, we consider \(v \in \mathcal {G}_N\) such that \(v(N)=\varepsilon \in (0,\delta )\) and \(v(S)=0\) for \(S\ne N\). By (M\(^{-}\)), \(f_i(v)\ge f_i(\mathbf 0 )=\delta \). Also, by (SP), \(f_i(v)>0\) for all \(i \in N\). This contradicts (E) because \(v(N)=\varepsilon \in (0,\delta )\).
References
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This paper was previously circulated as “Priority-regarding Shapley values”. The authors are grateful to an associate editor and anonymous referees for many helpful suggestions. We thank Yukihiko Funaki, Hideshi Itoh, Jingyi Xue, Shinsuke Kambe, Takashi Ui and Koji Yokote for constructive comments. We also thank seminar participants in the Contract Theory Workshop East and Graduate Summer Workshop on Game Theory 2016 at Soul National University. Abe and Nakada acknowledge financial support from the Japan Society for Promotion of Science (JSPS). All remaining errors are our own.
Appendices
Appendix A: Proof of Theorem 2
Let \(\mathcal {G}^{c} \subseteq \mathcal {G}\) denote the set of games such that \(v(N)=c\). Also, for any player \(i\in N\) and \(c\in \mathbb {R}\), let \(\mathcal {G}^{c,i}\) denote the set of games v such that \(v(N)=c\) and i is null player. Note that \(\mathcal {G}^{c,i} \subseteq \mathcal {G}^{c}\) for all \(i\in N\) and \(c\in \mathbb {R}\). Let \(\varDelta _i(v)=(v(S\cup \{i\})-v(S))_{S\subseteq N{\setminus } \{i\}} \in \mathbb {R}^{2^{(N-1)}}\) be a vector of marginal contributions of i in v. Therefore player \(i\in N\) is a null player in v if \(\varDelta _i(v)= \mathbf{0}\). Let \(\varLambda ^i\) be the set of all vectors of marginal contribution of i: \(\varLambda ^i=\{ \varDelta _i(v) | v\in \mathcal {G}\}\).
For each \(x \in \mathbb {R}^N\), let \(m_x \in \mathcal {G}\) be an additive game, \(m_x(S)=\sum _{i \in S}x_i\) for all \(S \subseteq N\). Let \(\mathcal {G}^{add}\) be the set of additive games. Since there is a one-to-one correspondence between \(x \in \mathbb {R}^N\) and an additive game \(m_x\), we can identify \(\mathcal {G}^{add}\) with \(\mathbb {R}^N\). Abe and Nakada (2017) provide the following result, which will be useful later.
Theorem A.1
(Abe and Nakada 2017) Let \(n \ne 2\). \(f:\mathcal {G}^{add} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}^n\) satisfies (E), (\(\mathrm {M}^{-}\)), (NY), and (RIN) if and only if there exists some \(\delta \in [0,1]\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\) such that \(f_i(x)=\delta \cdot x_i+(1-\delta ) \cdot w_i \cdot \sum _{l \in N}x_l\) for all \(x \in \mathbb {R}^n\) and \(i \in N\).
Now, we offer the proof of Theorem 2. It is clear that the rule satisfies all the axioms. We suppose that a rule \(f: \mathcal {G}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^N\) satisfies (E), (\(\mathrm {M}^{-}\)), (RIN), (WDMSP), and (NY).
Claim 1
For each \(i \in N\), there exist functions \(\phi _i: \varLambda ^i \times \mathbb {R}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) and \(\alpha _i: \mathbb {R}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) such that \(f_i(v)=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))+\alpha _i(v(N))\).
We first take any \(c\in \mathbb {R}\). For any \(i\in N\) and \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\), we have the following equation: for any \(\bar{v}\in \mathcal {G}^c\) such that \(\varDelta _i(v)=\varDelta _i(\bar{v})\),
Specifically, we denote
Moreover, for any \(i\in N\) and \(v,v' \in \mathcal {G}^c\), we have
Hence, for any \(i\in N\) and \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\), we obtain the following equation: for any \(v' \in \mathcal {G}^{c,i}\),
Note that \(f_i(v)-\alpha _i(c)\) is independent from \(v' \in \mathcal {G}^{c,i}\). For any \(i\in N\) and \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\) let
Hence, for any \(i\in N\) and \(v \in \mathcal {G}\), we obtain
This completes Claim 1.
Claim 2
For any \(i\in N\), and \(c \in \mathbb {R}\), the function \(\phi _i(\cdot , c): \varLambda ^i \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) satisfies (M) within \(\mathcal {G}^c\): for any \(v,v'\in \mathcal {G}^c\), if \(v(S\cup \{i\})-v(S)\ge v'(S\cup \{i\})-v'(S)\) for any \(S\subset N{\setminus } \{i\}\), then \(\phi (\varDelta _i(v), c)\ge \phi (\varDelta _i(v'), c)\). Moreover, \(\phi _i(\mathbf{0},c)=0\).
Let \(c=v(N)=v'(N)\). We have
Moreover, for any \(c\in \mathbb {R}\),
Claim 3
The function \(\phi \) is symmetric: for any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(i, j \in N\), if i, j is symmetric in v, then \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))=\phi _j(\varDelta _j(v), v(N))\).
For any \(i,j\in N\) and \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) such that \(v(S \cup \{i\})-v(S) = v(S \cup \{j\})-v(S)\) for all \(S \subseteq N{\setminus }\{i,j\}\), let \(v'=v(N)u_{N \backslash \{i,j\}}\). Then, we have
This completes Claim 3.
Claim 4
The function \(\phi \) satisfies \(\delta \)-efficiency (\(\delta \)-E): there is a \(\delta \in [0,1]\) such that
\(\sum _{i \in N}\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))=\delta v(N)\) for any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\).
Let \({\tilde{f}}: \mathcal {G}^{add} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) be the restriction of f on \(\mathcal {G}^{add}\). Then, by Theorem A.1, for each \(m_x \in \mathcal {G}^{add}\), we have
for some \(\delta \in [0,1]\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\). In particular, for \(x_i=0\), (A.7) implies \(\alpha _i(\sum _{l \in N}x_l)\)\(= (1-\delta ) \cdot w_i \cdot \sum _{l \in N}x_l\). Hence, from Claim 1, it follows that for each \(v \in \mathcal {G}\),
Since f satisfies (E), \(\sum _{i \in N}f_i(v)=\sum _{i \in N}\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))+(1-\delta ) v(N)=v(N)\), which implies that \(\phi \) satisfies the following property:
This completes Claim 4.
Claim 5
There is a \(\delta \in [0,1]\) and a \(w \in \mathcal {W}\) such that \(f_i(x)=\delta \cdot Sh_i(v)+(1-\delta ) \cdot w_i \cdot v(N)\) for any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\).
Fixing \(c \in \mathbb {R}\), we write \(\phi _i^c(v)=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), c)\) for each \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\). The function \(\phi ^c(v): \mathcal {G}^c \rightarrow \mathbb {R}^N\) satisfies (\(\delta \)-E), (M) and (SYM) within \(\mathcal {G}^c\) by Claims 2, 3 and 4. Hence, by the same argument of Theorem 1, we have
Since \(c \in \mathbb {R}\) is arbitrarily chosen, for any \(v\in \mathcal {G}\), we have
Finally, by (A.10) and (A.11), we obtain \(f_i(x)=\delta \cdot Sh_i(v)+(1-\delta ) \cdot w_i \cdot v(N)\), which completes the proof. \(\square \)
Appendix B: Proof of Theorem 3
We first show that (E\(^*\)), (M\(^{-*}\)), (SYM\(^{*}\)) characterizes the egalitarian Shapley value when we fix \(w=(\frac{1}{n},\ldots ,\frac{1}{n})\), which can be useful in later.
Lemma 1
Suppose that \(\mathcal {W}=\{(\frac{1}{n},\ldots ,\frac{1}{n})\}\) and \(n \ne 2\). Then, an allocation rule \(f: \mathcal {G}\times \mathcal {W}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^N\) satisfies (E\(^*\)), (M\(^{-*}\)), (SYM\(^{*}\)) if and only if it is an egalitarian-Shapley value.
Proof
This follows from the axioms and arguments in Casajus and Huettner (2014) if \(w=(\frac{1}{n},\ldots ,\frac{1}{n})\). \(\square \)
Now, we offer the proof of Theorem 3. It is clear that the rule satisfies all the axioms. We suppose that a rule \(f: \mathcal {G}\rightarrow \mathbb {R}^N\) satisfies (E\(^*\)), (\(\mathrm {M}^{-*}\)), (RIN\(^*\)), (SYM\(^{*}\)), and (FEC\(^*\)). Claim 1 can be thought of as an analog of that of Theorem 2. The differences lie in Claims 2, 3 and 4. In this proof, we first specify the form of the Shapley value, while we first specify the weighted division in Theorem 2.
Claim 1
For each \(i \in N\), there exists functions \(\phi _i(v): \varLambda ^i \times \mathbb {R}\)\( \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) and \(\alpha _i: \mathcal {W} \times \mathbb {R} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) such that \(f_i(v,w)=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))+\alpha _i(w, v(N))\).
We first take any \(c \in \mathbb {R}\). For any \(i \in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\), we have the following equation: for any \({\bar{v}} \in \mathcal {G}^c\) such that \(\varDelta _i(v)=\varDelta _i({\bar{v}})\),
Specifically, we denote
By (FEC\(^*\)), for any \(c\in \mathbb {R}\) and \(i\in N\), there is a function \(\phi ^c_i:\mathcal {G}^c \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) such that
By (B.1), we know that \(\phi ^c_i(v)=\phi ^c_i({\bar{v}})\) if \(v(N)={\bar{v}}(N)=c\) and \(\varDelta _i(v)=\varDelta _i({\bar{v}})\). Hence, we can define \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), c): \varLambda ^i \times \mathbb {R} \rightarrow \mathbb {R}\) as \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), c)=:\phi ^c_i(v)\). Therefore, for any \(i \in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\), we obtain \(f_i(v,w)=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))\)\(+\alpha _i(w, v(N))\). This completes Claim 1.
Claim 2
For any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\), there exists a \(\delta \in [0,1]\) and \(d^{v(N)}_i \in \mathbb {R}\) such that \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v), v(N))=\delta Sh_i(v)+d^{v(N)}_i\).
Let \(w^*=(1/n,\ldots ,1/n) \in \mathcal {W}\), i.e., the equal weight. For any \(c \in \mathbb {R}\) and any \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\), by Claim 1, we have
and, by Lemma 1, there exists \(\delta \in [0,1]\) such that
Note that \(\delta \) does not depend on \(c \in \mathbb {R}\). For any \(v'\in \mathcal {G}^{c,i}\), we have
Note that player i is a null player in game \(v'\in \mathcal {G}^{c,i}\). Hence, for any \(v',v''\in \mathcal {G}^{c,i}\), we have \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v'), c)+\alpha _i(w^*, c)\overset{(B.5)}{=}(1-\delta )\frac{1}{n}c\overset{(B.5)}{=}\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v''), c)+\alpha _i(w^*, c)\) and, so, denote \(d^c_i:=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v'), c)=\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v''), c)\). We obtain
Therefore, for every \(v \in \mathcal {G}^c\), we must have
Since \(c \in \mathbb {R}\) is arbitrary chosen, we obtain \(\phi _i(\varDelta _i(v'), v(N))=\delta Sh_i(v)+d^{v(N)}_i\) for all \(v \in \mathcal {G}\).
Claim 3
\(\alpha _i(w, v(N))=(1-\delta )\cdot w_iv(N)-d^{v(N)}_i\) for each \(w \in \mathcal {W}\).
Consider any \(w \in \mathcal {W}\) and player \(k^* \in N\) such that \(k^* \in \mathrm{argmin}_{i \in N, w_i>0} w_i\). Note that \(k^*\) is well-defined because \(\sum _{i \in N}w_i=1\) and \(w_i \ge 0\) for any \(i \in N\). By Claim 2, for any player \(i \ne k^*\) and any \(c\in \mathbb {R}\),
Hence, we have
Moreover, for any \(i\ne k^*\), j\((j\ne i,\ j\ne k^*)\) and, by considering a game \(cu_{\{j\}}\), we have
because i and \(k^*\) are null players in \(cu_{\{j\}}\). Therefore, for any \(i\in N\), we have
Since \(c \in \mathbb {R}\) is arbitrary chosen, we obtain \(\alpha _{i}(w, v(N))=(1-\delta )\cdot w_iv(N)-d^{v(N)}_i\) for all \(v \in \mathcal {G}\).
Claim 4
For any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w\in \mathcal {W}\), there exists a \(\delta \in [0,1]\) such that \(f_i(v,w)=\delta \cdot Sh_i(v) + (1-\delta )\cdot w_i v(N)\).
For any \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w\in \mathcal {W}\), we have
This completes the proof. \(\square \)
Appendix C: Independence of axioms and a counterexample for \(n=2\)
1.1 Independence of axioms for Theorem 2
The independence of the axioms is shown in the examples listed below.
Example C.1
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\) and \(v\in \mathcal {G}\),
This function satisfies all axioms except (E).
Example C.2
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\) and \(v\in \mathcal {G}\),
This function satisfies all axioms except (\(\mathrm {M}^{-}\)).
Example C.3
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\) and \(v\in \mathcal {G}\),
where \({\bar{N}}=\sum _{i \in N}i=\frac{n(n-1)}{2}\) and i is the natural number representing player i. This rule satisfies (E), (\(\mathrm {M}^{-}\)), (WMDSP) and (NY) but not (RIN). To check (\(\mathrm {M}^{-}\)), let \(h_i(a)= \frac{i+a^2}{{\bar{N}}+a^2}a=\frac{ia+a^3}{{\bar{N}}+a^2}\). Then, we have \(\frac{d h_i(a)}{da}=\frac{na^4+(3{\bar{N}}-ni)a^2+i{\bar{N}}}{({\bar{N}}+a^2)^2}>0\) for all \(a \in \mathbb {R}\) because \(na^4+i{\bar{N}}>0\) for all i and \(3{\bar{N}}-ni \ge \frac{n(n-3)}{2} \ge 0\).
Example C.4
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\) and \(v\in \mathcal {G}\),
where \(P^\sigma _i\) is the set of predecessors of i in \(\sigma \). This function satisfies all the axioms except (WMDSP).
Example C.5
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\) and \(v\in \mathcal {G}\),
This rule satisfies all the axioms except (NY).
1.2 Independence of axioms for Theorem 3
The independence of the axioms is shown in the examples listed below.
Example C.6
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\),
Then, the function satisfies all axioms except (E\(^*\)).
Example C.7
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\),
Then, the function satisfies all axioms except (M\(^{-*}\)).
Example C.8
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\),
The function satisfies all axioms except (RIN\(^*\)).
Example C.9
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\),
where \(Sh^z_i(v)\) is the weighted Shapley value for a given weight \(z\in R^N_{++}\). Since anonymity is defined over \(\mathcal {G}\) and \(\mathcal {W}\), the function satisfies all axioms except (SYM\(^*\)).
Example C.10
Consider the following function: for any \(i\in N\), \(v \in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w \in \mathcal {W}\),
where \(w_{\text {min}}=\min _{j\in N} w_j\). This function satisfies all axioms except (FEC\(^*\)).
1.3 A counterexample to Theorems 2 and 3 for \(n=2\)
Theorems 2 and 3 fail for \(n=2\). Consider the following allocation rule \(f^{\heartsuit }\) on \(N=\{1,2\}\):
for any \(v\in \mathcal {G}\) and \(w\in \mathcal {W}\).
Note that this function does not depend on w. It is clear that \(f^{\heartsuit }\) satisfies (E\(^*\)) and (M\(^{-*}\)). It satisfies (SYM\(^{*}\)) because if the players 1 and 2 are symmetric in the sense of marginal contribution and have the same weight, they receive \((Sh_1(v),Sh_2(v))\). It satisfies (RIN\(^*\)) because if the players 1 and 2 are null players, the game v is the null game: \(v(12)=v(1)=v(2)=0\). Since \(f^{\heartsuit }\) does not depend on w, it clearly satisfies (FEC\(^*\)). The same argument applies to Theorem 2.
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Abe, T., Nakada, S. The weighted-egalitarian Shapley values. Soc Choice Welf 52, 197–213 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-018-1143-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00355-018-1143-3