In this chapter, we describe the essence and role of the institutions in the modern economic systems, the main issues concerning the institutional convergence in relation to the EU integration, the institutional capital and the impact of the quality and effectiveness of the institutions on...

This volume comprises several studies and papers published in the last decades. They have been selected and ranged so that to provide a minimum of coherence concerning the phases which Romania has crossed in her way to the advanced socio-economic system of European type: transition to the market...

We model the process of coalition formation in the 16th German Bundestag as a hedonic coalition formation game. In order to induce players' preferences in the game we apply the Shapley value of the simple game describing all winning coalitions in the Bundestag. Using different stability notions...

We are concerned with the problem of core membership testing for hedonic coalition formation games, which is to decide whether a certain coalition structure belongs to the core of a given game. We show that this problem is co-NP complete when players' preferences are additive.

We present a taxonomy of myopic stability concepts for hedonic games in terms of deviations, and discuss the status of the existence problems of stable coalition structures. In particular, we show that contractual strictly core stable coalition structures always exist, and provide sufficient...

We consider the class of proper monotonic simple games and study coalition formation when an exogenous weight vector and a solution concept are combined to guide the distribution power within winning coalitions. These distributions induce players' preferences over coalitions in a hedonic game....

Top responsiveness is introduced by Alcalde and Revilla [Journal of Mathematical Economics 40 (2004) 869-887] as a property which induces a rich domain on players's preferences in hedonic games, and guarantees the existence of core stable partitions. We strengthen this observation by proving the...

We consider hedonic coalition formation games that are induced by a simple TU-game and a cooperative solution. For such models, Shenoy's (1979) absence of the paradox of smaller coalitions provides a sufficient condition for core existence. We present three different versions of his condition in...

The top coalition property of Banerjee et al. (2001) and the common ranking property of Farrell and Scotchmer (1988) are sufficient conditions for core stability in hedonic games. We introduce the semistrict core as a stronger stability concept than the core, and show that the top coalition...