Considering coalition structures formed by an external licensor of a patented technology and oligopolistic firms, we investigate licensing agreements that can be reached as the bargaining outcomes under those coalition structures. The cores for coalition structures are empty, unless the grand coalition forms. We give the necessary and sufficient condition for the core (for the grand coalition) ...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TUgame and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy’s (1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in order to compare it to the top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (2001) that guarantees nonemptin...

We study coalition formation and the strategic timing of membership of an IEA for environmental issues in the Coalitional Bargaining Game (CBG) of Gomes (2005, Econometrica). For the general CBG, we derive the necessary and sufficient condition for immediate formation of the grand coalition. We apply the CBG to a river sharing problem with two symmetric upstream agents and one downstream agent....

The study of the buyer coalition has been reviewed by researchers for decades. However, there are few schemes applying ant colony optimization (ACO) for forming buyer coalition. In this paper, the approach called the Ant Colony for Buyer Coalition (ACBC) algorithm is proposed to form the buyer coalition with bundles of items. The main endeavor of the algorithm is to partition the whole group of...

Solutions to the coalition formation problem commonly assume agent rationality and, correspondingly, utility maximization. This in turn may prevent agents from making compromises. As shown in recent studies, compromise may facilitate coalition formation and increase agent utilities. In this study we leverage on those new results. We devise a novel coalition formation mechanism that enhances com...

We consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings; i.e., where each player's payo is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition. We rst discuss how hedonic and non-hedonic settings di er and some su cient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings. We then focus on a weaker stability condit...

The coalition formation problem in an economy with externalities can be adequately modeled by using games in partition function form (PFF games), proposed by Thrall and Lucas. If we suppose that forming the grand coalition generates the largest total surplus, a central question is how to allocate the worth of the grand coalition to each player, i.e., how to find an adequate solution concept, ta...

A party is dominant if there is a majority coalition to which that party belongs such that it affords this party more possibilities to form an alternative winning coalition than any of the other members of the coalition (see Peleg [1980, 1981]). In this article I present empirical evidence showing that an allocation of seats in a parliament is biased toward the high frequency occurrence of a do...

Within characteristic function games, agents have the option of joining one of many different coalitions, based on the utility value of each candidate coalition. However, determining this utility value can be computationally complex since the number of coalitions increases exponentially with the number of agents available. Various approaches have been proposed that mediate this problem by distr...

This study examines the relationship between types of government and level of public spending. There are two competing perspectives about the consequences of coalition governments for the size of public expenditures. The most common argument is that government spending increases under coalition governments, compared with one-party governments. Another line of thought contends that coalition gov...