An analysis of the shapley value and its uncertainty for the voting game

Abstract

The Shapley value provides a unique solution to coalition games and is used to evaluate a player's prospects of playing a game. Although it provides a unique solution, there is an element of uncertainty associated with this value. This uncertainty in the solution of a game provides an additional dimension for evaluating a player's prospects of playing the game. Thus, players want to know not only their Shapley value for a game, but also the associated uncertainty. Given this, our objective is to determine the Shapley value and its uncertainty and study the relationship between them for the voting game. But since the problem of determining the Shapley value for this game is #P-complete, we first present a new polynomial time randomized method for determining the approximate Shapley value. Using this method, we compute the Shapley value and correlate it with its uncertainty so as to allow agents to compare games on the basis of both their Shapley values and the associated uncertainties. Our study shows that, a player's uncertainty first increases with its Shapley value and then decreases. This implies that the uncertainty is at its minimum when the value is at its maximum, and that agents do not always have to compromise value in order to reduce uncertainty. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.