Cooperative and strategic games in network economics

It is a well-accepted fact that doings and decisions of virtually every acting subject - whether it is an individual, an organization, or even an entire country - do inevitably influence and connect to the actions of other subjects. Depending on the context, these mutual interdependencies induce network-like relationships which may take various forms. Consequently, since the phenomenon occurs in many situations of economic life, for many years now more and more attention has been devoted to the study of economic networks and the number of publications dealing with this subject is continuously increasing. The objective of this thesis is to highlight cooperative as well as strategic games in this field of research in order to explore this aspect in more detail and to complement it by analyzing issues which have not been covered so far. More precisely: The main goal is to model the economic problems addressed in network economics more realistically in order to enlarge the field of possible applications. This is done by allowing for more flexibility in the formal substructure of the standard approaches.