Survey Form Theory

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Cooperative game theory is a branch of (micro-)economics that studies the behavior of self-interested agents in strategic settings where binding agreements among agents are possible. Our aim in this book is to present a survey of work on the computational aspects of cooperative game theory. We begin by formally defining transferable utility games in characteristic function form, and introducing key solution concepts such as the core and the Shapley value. We then discuss two major issues that arise when considering such games from a computational perspective: identifying compact representations for games, and the closely related problem of efficiently computing solution concepts for games. We survey several formalisms for cooperative games that have been proposed in the literature, including, for example, cooperative games defined on networks, as well as general compact representation schemes such as MC-nets and skill games. As a detailed case study, we consider weighted voting games: a widely-used and practically important class of cooperative games that inherently have a natural compact representation. We investigate the complexity of solution concepts for such games, and generalizations of them.

This book is the result of lectures which I gave dur­ ing the academic year 1972-73 to third-year students a~ Aarhus University in Denmark. The purpose of the book, as of the lectures, is to survey some of the main themes in the modern theory of stochastic processes. In my previous book Probability: ! survey of the mathe­ matical theory I gave a short overview of "classical" proba­ bility mathematics, concentrating especially on sums of inde­ pendent random variables. I did not discuss specific appli­ cations of the theory; I did strive for a spirit friendly to application by coming to grips as fast as I could with the major problems and techniques and by avoiding too high levels of abstraction and completeness. At the same time, I tried to make the proofs both rigorous and motivated and to show how certain results have evolved rather than just presenting them in polished final form. The same remarks apply to this book, at least as a statement of intentions, and it can serve as a sequel to the earlier one continuing the story in the same style and spirit. The contents of the present book fall roughly into two parts. The first deals mostly with stationary processes, which provide the mathematics for describing phenomena in a steady state overall but subject to random fluctuations. Chapter 4 is the heart of this part.

This volume contains the proceedings of the very successful second China-Japan Seminar held in lizuka, Fukuoka, Japan, during March 12-16, 2001 under the support of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) and the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and some invited papers of eminent number-theorists who visited Japan during 1999-2001 at the occasion of the Conference at the Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences (RIMS), Kyoto University. The proceedings of the 1st China-Japan Seminar held in September 1999 in Beijing has been published recently {2002) by Kluwer as DEVM 6 which also contains some invited papers. The topics of that volume are, however, restricted to analytic number theory and many papers in this field are assembled. In this volume, we return to the lines of the previous one "Number Theory and its Applications", published as DEVM 2 by Kluwer in 1999 and uphold the spirit of presenting various topics in number theory and related areas with possible applica­ tions, in a unified manner, and this time in nearly a book form with a well-prepared index. We accomplish this task by collecting highly informative and readable survey papers (including half-survey type papers), giving overlooking surveys of the hith­ erto obtained results in up-to-the-hour form with insight into the new developments, which are then analytically continued to a collection of high standard research papers which are concerned with rather diversed areas and will give good insight into new researches in the new century.

This book presents a systematic overview on partition function form games: a game form in cooperative game theory to integrate externalities for various applications. Cooperative game theory has been immensely useful to study a wide range of issues, but the standard approaches ignore the side effects of cooperation. Recently interest shifted to problems where externalities play the main roles such as models of cooperation in market competition or the shared use of public resources. Such problems require richer models that can explicitly evaluate the side-effects of cooperation.