This chapter gives a flavour of recent theoretical work on coalition formation and political parties. I survey recent work on both pre-election coalition formation and post election coalition (or government) formation. A number of alternative rationales for the formation of parties are compared...

Voting Power Indices enable the analysis of the distribution of power in a legislature or voting body which uses weighted voting. Although the approach, based on co-operative game theory, has been known for a long time it has not been very widely applied, in part because of the difficulty of...

We introduce the framework of parameterized collections of games with and without sidepayments and provide three nonemptiness of approximate core theorems. The parameters bound (a) the number of approximate types of players and the size of the approximation and (b) the size of nearly effective...

A "law of scarcity" is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we show that equal treatment core payout vectors satisfy a condition of cyclic monotonicity. Our results are developed for parameterized collections of games...

A 2law of scarcity2 is that scarceness is rewarded. We demonstrate laws of scarcity for cores and approximate cores of games. Furthermore, we demonstrate conditions under which all payoffs in the core of any game in a parametized collection have an equal treatment property and show that equal...

An exercise in the empirical use of voting power indices from cooperative game theory applied to ownership data for large companies, this paper contributes in two areas : (1) the analysis of company control based on shareholder voting power, and (2) the empirical use of power indices and...

Voting Power Indices enable the analysis of the distribution of power in a legislature or voting body in which different members have different numbers of votes. Although this approach to the measurement of power, based on co-operative game theory, has been known for a long time its empirical...

This paper examines the irreversible adoption of a technology whose returns are uncertain, when there is an advantage to being the first adopter, but a network advantage to adopting when others also do so. Two patterns of adoption emerge: sequential, in which the leader aggressively preempts its...