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Computing the nucleolus of weighted voting games in pseudo-polynomial time

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Abstract

In cooperative games, players have a possibility to form different coalitions. This leads to the questions about ways to motivate all players to collaborate, i.e. to motivate the players to form the so-called grand coalition. One of such ways is captured by the concept of nucleolus, which dates back to Babylonian Talmud. Weighted voting games form a class of cooperative games, that are often used to model decision making processes in parliaments. In this paper, we provide an algorithm for computing the nucleolus for an instance of a weighted voting game in pseudo-polynomial time. This resolves an open question posed by Elkind et al. (Ann Math Artif Intell 56(2), 109–131, 2007).

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dmitrii Pasechnik for pointing us to the problem of computing the nucleolus of weighted voting games in pseudo-polynomial time. We are also grateful to Jochen Koenemann and Justin Toth for helpful discussions. We would also like to thank two reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments which helped to make the paper better.

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Correspondence to Kanstantsin Pashkovich.

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Pashkovich, K. Computing the nucleolus of weighted voting games in pseudo-polynomial time. Math. Program. 195, 1123–1133 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10107-021-01693-4

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