Power indices have been used to evaluate the allocation of power in a wide range of voting situations. While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priori voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming the random behaviour of the players. We introduce a...

In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed...

One of the aims of the new electoral law of Hungary has been to define a fairer apportionment into voting districts. This is ensured by a set of rules slightly more premissive than those laid out in the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters of the Venice Commission. These rules fix the...

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualied majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public figure...

The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators for academic journals and over the years a handful of scoring methods have been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent...

We study coalitional games where the coalitional payoffs depend on the entire coalition structure. We introduce a noncooperative, sequential coalition formation model and show that the set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with the recursive core, a generalisation of the core to such games. In...

To take development and budgeting decisions for research activi- ties the officials in charge need to constantly evaluate and assess the quality of research. Over the years a handful of scoring methods for academic journals have been proposed. Discussing the most prominent methods (de facto...

For each outcome (i.e.~a payoff vector augmented with a coalition structure) of a TU-game with a non-empty coalition structure core there exists a finite sequence of successively dominating outcomes that terminates in the coalition structure core. In order to obtain this result a restrictive...

This paper strengthens the result of Sengupta and Sengupta (1996). We show that for the class of games with nonempty cores the core can be reached in a bounded number of proposals and counterproposals. Our result is more general than this: the boundedness holds for any two imputations with an...

Power indices have been used to evaluate the allocation of power in a wide range of voting situations. While they use the language of game theory known measures of a priori voting power are hardly more than statistical expectations assuming the random behaviour of the players. We introduce a...