Tarsal coalitions are relatively rare diagnoses affecting adolescent patients that typically present with progressive foot pain. Cuboid-navicular coalition, a type of tarsal coalition, is extremely rare with less than 10 reported cases to date. Most prevailing theories reported have described this specific type of coalition as asymptomatic except at specific moments of stress and exercise. The ...

The present paper studies a new potential function of a cooperative game with a coalition structure. When define a marginal contribution of each player, a notion of a coalition formation by Hart and Kurz (1983) is considered. Our potential is a real-valued function in contrast to Winter (1992)’s one which is vector-valued function whose dimension is the number of elements in the coalition struc...

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in political environments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it, and it needs to be sel...

This paper studies coalition formation under asymmetric information. An outside party o ers private payments in order to in uence the collective decision over an unpopular reform. The willingness to accept such payments is private information. The paper demonstrates that a supermajority coalition induces truth-telling and secures the implementation of the decision for a price close to the full ...

Objective: To assess the relationship between the implementation of a SAFE KIDS Coalition and pediatric unintentional injury rates. Setting: Shelby County, Tennessee. Design: Retrospective observational analysis. Patients: County residents nine years of age or younger presenting to the children’s medical center, its emergency department, or its outpatient clinics from 1990–97. Intervention: Imp...

How does major policy change come about? This article identifies and rectifies weaknesses in the conceptualization of innovative policy change in the Advocacy Coalition Framework. In a case study of policy belief change preceding an innovative reform in the German subsystem of old-age security, important new aspects of major policy change are carved out. In particular, the analysis traces a tra...

Computing optimal coalition structures is an important research problem in multi-agent systems. It has rich application in real world problems, including logistics and supply chains. We study computing optimal coalition structures in linear production domains. The common goal of the agents is to maximize the system’s profit. Agents perform two steps: i) deliberate profitable coalitions, and ii)...

Consider a game with a finite set of players. A coalition is a nonempty subset of the set of players. A coalitional game with transferable payoff consists of (1) a finite set of players, N (2) a function v : S ⊆ N −→ R. The value of the function for a given S, v(S) is known as the worth of the coalition S. v(S) is the total payoff that is available for division among the members of the coalitio...