Games in Coalitional Form

Abstract

This chapter has had two principal purposes. One was to develop the idea of the “coalitional function” of a cooperative game as a means of abstracting from given settings (pure exchange economies, strategic-form games, political games, and the like) the possibilities available to the various coalitions through player cooperation. The other was to present several classes of games (market games, simple games, convex games, symmetric games) on which attention will be focused in subsequent chapters, and to provide several tools (covers and extensions, contractions and reductions, and the like) which will be useful in further analysis.