Weighing hierarchical power and active contribution in cooperative games with authorization structure

Abstract

Cooperative games model situations in which a group of players work together to make a profit. Frequently, in cooperative situations there are dependency or hierarchical relationships between the players, which must be taken into account when allocating the common profit obtained by the grand coalition. Multiple structures have been used in the literature to model those relationships, and several values have been proposed, but there is something in common in all of them: if a player can veto the participation of another in any coalition, then both players will receive the same share of the profit derived from the active cooperation of the vetoed player. In other words, actively cooperating and giving permission to cooperate are equally valued. In many situations this is neither fair nor realistic. In this paper we introduce a family of allocation rules for cooperative games with authorization structure, which reward positional power less than active cooperation.