A Class of Consistent Share Functions for Games in Coalition Structure

This discussion paper led to a publication in 'Games and Economic Behavior', 2005, 51, 193-212. <P> A cooperative game with transferable utility describes a situation in which players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation. A sharefunction for such games is a function which assigns for every game a distribution of the payoffs over the players in the game.In this paper we consider cooperative games in which the players are organized into an a priori coalition structure being a finite partition of the set of players. We introduce a general method for defining a class of share functions for such games in coalition structure using a multiplication property that states that the share of a player in the total payoff is equal to its share in some internal game within its coalition multiplied by the share of this coalition in an external game between the coalitions. We show that these coalition structure share functions satisfy certain consistency properties. We provide axiomatizations of this class of coalition structure share functions using these consistency and multiplication properties.