Simple games in partition function form are used to model voting situations where a coalition being winning or losing might depend on the way players outside that coalition organize themselves. Such a game is called a plurality voting game if in every partition there is at least one winning...

This paper aims to connect the social network literature on centrality measures with the economic literature on von Neumann-Morgenstern expected utility functions using cooperative game theory. The social network literature studies various concepts of network centrality, such as degree,...

We consider plurality voting games being simple games in partition function form such that in every partition there is at least one winning coalition. Such a game is said to be weighted if it is possible to assign weights to the players in such a way that a winning coalition in a partition is...

A stable government is by definition not dominated by any other government. However, it may happen that all governments are dominated. In graph-theoretic terms this means that the dominance graph does not possess a source. In this paper we are able to deal with this case by a clever combination...

We develop a modification of the connections model by Jackson and Wolinsky (1996) that takes into account negative externalities arising from the connectivity of direct and indirect neighbors, thus combining aspects of the connections model and the co-author model. We consider a general...

A well known and established model in communication policy in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors in a society who are able to affect the behavior of other members called followers. Hence, opinion leaders might have a considerable impact on the...

A well-known model in sociology and marketing is that of opinion leadership. Opinion leaders are actors who are able to affect the behavior of their followers. Hence, opinion leaders have some power over their followers, and they can exercise this power by influencing their followers choice of...

One of the most famous ranking methods for digraphs is the ranking by Copeland score. The Copeland score of a node in a digraph is the difference between its outdegree (i.e. its number of outgoing arcs) and its indegree (i.e. its number of ingoing arcs). In the ranking by Copeland score, a node...

We study the issue of assigning weights to players that identify winning coalitions in plurality voting democracies. For this, we consider plurality games which are simple games in partition function form such that in every partition there is at least one winning coalition. Such a game is said...

The paper presents a survey on selected models of opinion dynamics. Both discrete (more precisely, binary) opinion models as well as continuous opinion models are discussed. We focus on frameworks that assume non-Bayesian updating of opinions. In the survey, a special attention is paid to...