An interdisciplinary approach to coalition formation

A stable government is by definition not dominated by any other government. However, it may happen that all governments are dominated. In graph-theoretic terms this means that the dominance graph does not possess a source. In this paper we are able to deal with this case by a clever combination of notions from different fields, such as relational algebra, graph theory and social choice theory, and by using the computer support system RelView for computing solutions and visualizing the results. Using relational algorithms, in such a case we break all cycles in each initial strongly connected component by removing the vertices in an appropriate minimum feedback vertex set. In this way we can choose a government that is as close as possible to being un-dominated. To achieve unique solutions, we additionally apply the majority ranking recently introduced by Balinski and Laraki. The main parts of our procedure can be executed using the RelView tool. Its sophisticated implementation of relations allows to deal with graph sizes that are sufficient for practical applications of coalition formation. Corresponding author: Harrie de Swart, Tilburg University, Department of Philosophy, P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands. e-mail: [email protected] JEL Classification: D85, C63, C88, D71, D72