Cooperative Game Theory

The aim of this article is to measure the power of the members of french universities boards of directors, power such as mentioned by the law relative to the liberties and the responsabilities of universities (in french, the ?LRU? law). We use tools from the cooperative game theory, and particularly the power index of Banzhaf. We show that the number of the representatives of a given group, for instance the professors or the students, and the power, are concepts the relationships of which are sometimes surprising. We provide examples where the real power of decision does not necessarily belong to the groups we thought of intuitively.

If a water main is not well protected against hydraulic transients, devastating consequences can occur. However, there are often many viable alternatives for transient protection. Multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) is applied here to help select an adequate protection system for a test pipeline subject to transients arising from a pump trip. Four alternatives are developed and all of them, when well chosen, result in acceptable extreme pressures. More specifically, the considered alternatives employed devices such as hydropneumatic bladder tanks, air valves and flywheels. In order to recommend a final choice of protection system, several criteria are used: general costs, reliability of the system, reliability of the simulation model, avoidance of extreme pressures, whether sub-atmospheric or excessively high values. Functions to evaluate and rank performance, regarding each criterion, are created. The proposed MCDA approach employs both the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Cooperative Game Theory (CGT).

This study argues that heterogeneous farms operating under a delivery target may yield significant economic benefits if they coordinate their production portfolio. To analyze the gains from cooperation, we simulate various cooperative game solutions over seven cotton producing farms in a bio-economic model of a water users association. The study results show that cooperation can fulfill multiple objectives: ensure the cotton production targets, increase farm profits and grain production, and reduce the pressure on water resources. We investigate a situation where farms differ in soil quality and distance to irrigation canals. The proposed modification in the national cotton procurement policy that utilizes the comparative advantages of cooperating cotton-producing farms can make the cooperative agreements economically attractive even among heterogeneous farms. It should be noted that the benefits offered from farm cooperation may be smaller or even vanish if transaction costs grow excessively in response to the heterogeneity of participating farms and the size of the cooperative. In addition, the economic benefits will not necessarily be distributed equally among participating farms and thus require the development of fair division rules. In this respect, net gain allocation schemes based on production costs, size and cotton output of farm cooperation are presented and discussed against the distinct social features of rural Uzbekistan.

The high-elevation hydropower system in California, composed of more than 150 hydropower plants and regulated by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), supplies 74 percent of in-state hydropower. The system has modest reservoir capacities and has been designed to take advantage of snowpack. The expected shift of runoff peak from spring to winter as a result of climate warming, resulting in snowpack reduction and earlier snowmelt, might have important effects on hydropower operations. Estimation of climate warming effects on such a large system by conventional simulation or optimization methods would be tedious and expensive. This dissertation presents a novel approach for modeling large hydropower systems. Conservation of energy and energy flows are used as the basis for modeling high-elevation high-head hydropower systems in California. The unusual energy basis for reservoir modeling allows for development of hydropower operations models to estimate large-scale system behavior without the expense and time needed to develop traditional streamflow and reservoir volume-based models in absence of storage and release capacity, penstock head, and efficiency information. An Energy-Based Hydropower Optimization Model (EBHOM) is developed to facilitate a practical climate change study based on the historical generation data high-elevation hydropower plants in California. Employing recent historical hourly energy prices, energy generation in California is explored for three climate warming scenarios (dry warming, wet warming, and warming-only) over 14 years, representing a range of hydrologic conditions. Currently, the high-elevation hydropower plants in California have to renew their FERC licenses. A method based on cooperative game theory is developed to explore FERC relicensing process, in which dam owners negotiate over the available instream water with other interest groups downstream. It is discussed how the lack of incentive for cooperation results in long delay in FERC relicensing in practice and argued how climate change may provide an incentive for cooperation among the parties to hasten the relicensing. An “adaptive FERC license” framework is proposed, to improve the performance and adaptability of the system to future changes with no cost to the FERC, in face of uncertainty about future hydrological and ecological conditions.

We investigate the impact and the possible consequences of the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We model the European gas network as a cooperative game between regions as players over the pipeline network. Our model offers several novelties compared to earlier cooperative studies. Firstly, we focus on cost saving rather than on the profits of cooperation. Secondly, we introduce liquefied natural gas as a player. Thirdly, we apply an iterative linear program to account for the long term bilateral contracts that still drive the gas market. This modelling technique also allows us to identify individual gas flows. We focus on the change of influence of the players in three different scenarios. We investigate how the power of the agents shift when the Nord Stream pipeline is expanded, when the Ukrainian pipeline is shut down and finally when both of these happen. Our calculations show that when Nord Stream 2 is operational, Russia and Western Europe improve their position compared to the base scenario, while other suppliers, notably Norway, together with Central-Eastern-and Southern Europe suffer losses, especially when the Ukrainian route is dismissed. The results highlight that both the supporters and adversaries of Nord Stream 2 are governed by self-interest and solidarity and trust, the values proclaimed by the EU and the Energy Union, remain but a slogan.

This paper considers one machine job scheduling situations or sequencing problems, where clients can have more than a single job to be processed in order to get a final output. Moreover, a job can be of interest for different players. This means that one of the main assumptions in classic sequencing problems is dropped: the one to one correspondence between clients and jobs. It is shown that the corresponding cooperative games are balanced for specific types of cost criteria.

Supply chain management is related to the coordination of materials, products and information flows among suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and customers involved in producing and delivering a final product or service. In this setting the centralization of inventory management and coordination of actions, to further reduce costs and improve customer service level, is a relevant issue. In this paper, we

The facility location game in continuous setting usually has two distinct sections: the location problem, where the facility position is found by cost minimization; the cost allocation, where the distribution of total cost is studied with cooperative game theoretic solution concepts, such as the Core or the Shapley Value. This paper shows how the cost allocation rules can also provide solutions for the location part. In particular, after having defined a generalized game (which avoids attaching a minimization problem for the location part), we study the concept of the “set of Core locations” (or location-Core), i.e. the set of feasible locations satisfying the Core conditions, a concept that was first introduced under a narrower setting by the author in [3]. Thanks to a more formal problem definition, the location-Core is here generalized and further investigated.

In this account of the history of voting-power measurement, we confine ourselves to the concept of a priori voting power. We show how the concept was re-invented several times and how the circumstances in which it was reinvented led to conceptual confusion as to the true meaning of what is being measured. In particular, power-as-influence was conflated with value in the sense of transferable utility cooperative game theory (power as share in constant total payoff). Influence was treated, improperly, as though it were transferable utility, and hence an additive and distributive quantity. We provide examples of the resulting misunderstanding and mis-directed criticism.

In this document, we present the notion of a cost game, defined as a cooperative game where the gain from cooperation is the cost reduction obtained when the projects of a set of agents are realized in a coordinated way. The problem is then to decide how this gain will be shared among agents or similarly how the joint realization

This work is an overview on n-person cooperative games in Game Theory, the mathemat- ical theory of interactive decision situations characterized by a group of agents, each of whom has to make a decision based on their own preferences on the set of outcomes. These situations are called games, agents are players and decisions are strategies. By focusing on Cooperative Game Theory, we analyze concepts such as coalition formation, equilibrium, stability, fairness and the most important proposed solution concepts.

As competition from emerging economies such as China and India puts pressure on global supply chains and as new constraints emerge, it presents opportunities for approaches such as game theory for solving the transshipment problem. In this paper we use the well-known Shapley value concept from cooperative game theory as an approach to solve the transshipment problem for maintaining stable conditions in the logistics network. A numerical example is presented to show the usefulness of this approach.

—Sharing economy is a transformative socioeconomic phenomenon built around the idea of sharing underused resources and services, e.g. transportation and housing, thereby reducing costs and extracting value. Anticipating continued reduction in the cost of electricity storage, we look into the potential opportunity in electrical power system where consumers share storage with each other. We consider two different scenarios. In the first scenario, consumers are assumed to already have individual storage devices and they explore cooperation to minimize the realized electricity consumption cost. In the second scenario, a group of consumers is interested to invest in joint storage capacity and operate it cooperatively. The resulting system problems are modeled using cooperative game theory. In both cases, the cooperative games are shown to have non-empty cores and we develop efficient cost allocations in the core with analytical expressions. Thus, sharing of storage in cooperative manner is shown to be very effective for the electric power system.

The paper focuses on the change in household income composition and the factors that determine it. The results bring additional knowledge about household poverty dynamics. Based on the collective approach to the family and the cooperative game theory it is constructed theoretical model of household income composition change. The change in income composition is a result from bargaining between household members in attempt to defend the most suitable for them income source. Decisive influence in the household income pattern bargaining have specific set of household goods. Through empirical analysis of European Community Household Panel 2003 data it is proved that the adoption of definite income compositions (with prevailing wages and salaries share and with prevailing social transfers share) is a result from the availability of specific set of household goods.