Information collecting situations and bi-monotonic allocation schemes

This paper studies information collecting (IC) situations with the help of cooperative game theory. Relations are established between IC situations and IC games on one hand and information sharing (IS) situations and IS games on the other hand. Further, it is shown that IC games are convex combinations of so-called local games. Properties such as k-convexity and k-concavity are possessed by an IC game if all related local games have the respective properties. Special attention is paid to the classes of k-symmetric IC games and k-concave IC games. This last class turns out to consist of total big boss games. For the class of total big boss games a new solution concept is introduced: bi-monotonic allocation schemes. This solution takes the power of the big boss into account. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2001