Partition Function Form Games ― Coalitional Games With Externalities

This book presents a systematic overview on partition function form games: a game form in cooperative game theory to integrate externalities for various applications. Cooperative game theory has been immensely useful to study a wide range of issues, but the standard approaches ignore the side effects of cooperation. Recently interest shifted to problems where externalities play the main roles such as models of cooperation in market competition or the shared use of public resources. Such problems require richer models that can explicitly evaluate the side-effects of cooperation. In partition function form games the value of cooperation depends on the outsiders' actions. A recent surge of interest driven by applications has made results very fragmented. This book offers an accessible, yet comprehensive and systematic study of properties, solutions and applications of partition function games surveying both theoretical results and their applications. It assembles a survey of existing research and smaller original results as well as original interpretations and comparisons. The book is self-contained and accessible for readers with little or no knowledge of cooperative game theory.

Laszlo A. Koczy graduated from the University of Cambridge reading mathematics and computer science, but turned to economics and completed his M.Sc. and Ph.D. at the Catholic University Leuven under the supervision of Luc Lauwers. He spent some years at Maastricht University before returning to Hungary, to Obuda University. In 2010 he was the first social scientist to obtain the prestigious Momentum Grant of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences allowing him to set up his Game Theory Research Group at the Centre for Economics and Regional Studies. Koczy has made contributions to scientometrics and social choice, but his main field of research is cooperative game theory: cooperative games with externalities and power indices.
Laszlo A. Koczy is member of the Game Theory Society, the Society for Social Choice and Welfare and a founding member and former president of the Hungarian Society for Economists. He has published over thirty papers in journals including Games and Economic Behavior, Economic Theory, and Social Choice and Welfare.