Playing The Marginality Game

In Guinea, situated against the background of central government struggles, rural elites use identity politics through contemporary political reforms to maintain their privileges and perpetuate a generations-old local social contract that bridges ethnic and religious divides. Simultaneously, administrative reform and national unrest lead to the creative re-combination of sources of authority and practices of legitimate rule. Past periods of colonization, socialism and authoritarian regime are reflected in contemporary struggles to make sense of participatory democracy and the future of the embattled Guinean national state.

In the absence of externalities, marginality is equivalent to an independence property that rests on Harsanyi's dividends. These dividends identify the surplus inherent to each coalition. Independence states that a player's payoff stays the same if only dividends of coalitions to which this player does not belong to change. We introduce notions of marginality and independence for games with externalities. We measure a player's contribution in an embedded coalition by the change in the worth of this coalition that results when the player is removed from the game. We provide a characterization result using efficiency, anonymity, and marginality or independence, which generalizes Young's characterization of the Shapley value. An application of our result yields a new characterization of the solution put forth by Macho-Stadler et al. (J Econ Theor, 135, 2007, 339-356) without linearity, as well as for almost all generalizations put forth in the literature. The introduced method also allows us to investigate egalitarian solutions and to reveal how accounting for externalities may result in a deviation from the Shapley value. This is exemplified with a new solution that is designed in a way to not reward external effects, while at the same time it cannot be assumed that any partition is the default partition.

This book presents a systematic overview on partition function form games: a game form in cooperative game theory to integrate externalities for various applications. Cooperative game theory has been immensely useful to study a wide range of issues, but the standard approaches ignore the side effects of cooperation. Recently interest shifted to problems where externalities play the main roles such as models of cooperation in market competition or the shared use of public resources. Such problems require richer models that can explicitly evaluate the side-effects of cooperation. In partition function form games the value of cooperation depends on the outsiders' actions. A recent surge of interest driven by applications has made results very fragmented. This book offers an accessible, yet comprehensive and systematic study of properties, solutions and applications of partition function games surveying both theoretical results and their applications. It assembles a survey of existing research and smaller original results as well as original interpretations and comparisons. The book is self-contained and accessible for readers with little or no knowledge of cooperative game theory.

Few phenomena have found such divergent descriptions in sociological lit erature as have social inconsistencies. They were studied by George Herbert Mead as eruptive "natural" events constituting a social temporality. Alfred SchUtz described them as "explosions" of the individual actor's anticipatory action patterns. Talcott Parsons attempted to grasp social inconsistencies into his frame of "pattern variables," while Erving Goffman dealt with them as disruptions of "fostered impressions of reality" maintained by one or the other dominant team. The present study traces these divergent approaches back to various un checked assumptions concerning the structure and the constitution of social types. Thus, to further clarify the relationship between social types and the relevance structure of interactional situations has been my first objective. This initially rather limited intention widened when the role of social incon sistencies for analysing the differences between play, game, and social action proper in the immediate context of social interaction became apparent. The structure of social inconsistencies seems to hold a key to unifying the theo ries of play and social, action.

The game is on. Do you know how to play? Game theory sets out to explore what can be said about making decisions which go beyond accepting the rules of a game. Since 1942, a well elaborated mathematical apparatus has been developed to do so; but there is more. During the last three decades game theoretic reasoning has popped up in many other fields as well - from engineering to biology and psychology. New simulation tools and network analysis have made game theory omnipresent these days. This book collects recent research papers in game theory, which come from diverse scientific communities all across the world; they combine many different fields like economics, politics, history, engineering, mathematics, physics, and psychology. All of them have as a common denominator some method of game theory. Enjoy.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to cooperative game theory and a practice-oriented reference guide to new models and tools for studying bilateral fuzzy relations among several agents or players. It introduces the reader to several fuzzy models, each of which is first analyzed in the context of classical games (crisp games) and subsequently in the context of fuzzy games. Special emphasis is given to the value of Shapley, which is presented for the first time in the context of fuzzy games. Students and researchers will find here a self-contained reference guide to cooperative fuzzy games, characterized by a wealth of examples, descriptions of a wide range of possible situations, step-by-step explanations of the basic mathematical concepts involved, and easy-to-follow information on axioms and properties.

This book pursues an original perspective on Europe's shifting extent and geopolitical standing: how countries and spaces marginal to it impact on Europe as a center. A theoretical discussion of borders and margins is developed, and set against nine studies of countries, regions, and identities seen as marginal to Europe.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory, SAGT 2011, held in Amalfi, Italy, in October 2011. The 26 revised full papers presented together with 2 invited lectures were carefully reviewed and selected from 65 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on auctions and advertising, quality of solutions, externalities, mechanism design, complexity, network games, pricing, as well as routing games.

This book introduces new concepts for cooperative game theory, and particularly solutions that determine the distribution of a coalitional surplus among the members of the coalition. It also addresses several generalizations of cooperative game theory. Drawing on methods of welfare economics, new value solutions are derived for Non-Transferable Utility games with and without differences of bargaining power among the members of the coalition. Cooperation in intertemporal games is examined, and conditions that permit the reduction of these games to games in coalition function form are outlined. Biform games and games that combine non-cooperative search and matching of coalition members with cooperative solutions (i.e., efficient contracts) within the coalition are considered.

"Deals with real life situations where objectives of the participants are partially cooperative and partially conflicting"--