Bargaining power in communication networks

The aim of this paper is to determine how the place of a player in a network of communications ̊ affects her bargaining power with respect to the others. We adapt the Rubinstein-Stahl two-player noncooperative bargaining game of alternating offers to the case of n players connected through a graph. We show that this game has a unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium outcome from which we derive a bargaining power measure. This bargaining power measure satisfies properties of efficiency, anonymity, monotonicity, local impact, weighted fairness and fair reallocation that we define and discuss.  2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.