Solutions for coalitional bargaining games

Abstract

A natural extension of an n-person pure bargaining game is a coalitional bargaining game. In a coalitional bargaining game coalitions other than the grand coalition consisting of the whole player set N, or trivial coalitions consisting of single players, may form. Such a game is described by a characteristic function assigning to each coalition M ⊂ N some subset of ℝ ^M. We call these games coalitional bargaining games in order to keep in line with the main subject of this book; more often, however, they are called games without transferable utility or without sidepayments — the latter expression being more general, see Aumann (1967). There are many applications of these games to economic models, see Friedman (1986), Rosenmüller (1981), or the references in Aumann (1985b).