Mediation is a dispute resolution process whereby agents reach a mutually acceptable agreement among different proposals that satisfy a set of principles. This paper provides a natural way of coming to such agreements in claims problems. In our approach, mediation combines (i) a set of fair...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

This chapter studies the theory of value of games with infinitely many players.Games with infinitely many players are models of interactions with many players. Often most of the players are individually insignificant, and are effective in the game only via coalitions. At the same time there may...

We study allocation rules that are robust to coalitional manipulation by transferring, merging, or splitting individual characteristics among coalition partners (e.g. merging or splitting claims in bankruptcy problems). Coalition formation is restricted by an exogenous network (a non-directed...

In this paper we address several issues related to collective dichotomous decision-making by means of quaternary voting rules, i.e., when voters may choose between four actions: voting yes, voting no, abstaining and not turning up-which are aggregated by a voting rule into a dichotomous...

We provide a general framework for the analysis of the dynamics of institutional change (e.g., democratization, extension of political rights or repression of different groups), and how these dynamics interact with (anticipated and unanticipated) changes in the distribution of political power...

An apex game consists of one apex player and a set of minor players. We identify two key properties of apex games and use them to introduce the class of general apex games. We derive players' preferences over winning coalitions by applying strongly monotonic power indices on such a game and all...

We study the relationship between the distribution of individuals' attributes over the population and the extent of risk sharing in a risky environment. We consider a society where individuals voluntarily form risk-sharing groups in the absence of financial markets. We obtain a partition of...

This chapter surveys a sizable and growing literature on coalition formation. We refer to theories in which one or more groups of agents (“coalitionsâ€) deliberately get together to jointly determine within-group actions, while interacting noncooperatively across groups. The chapter...

This paper considers marriage problems, roommate problems with nonempty core, and college admissions problems with responsive preferences. All stochastically stable matchings are shown to be contained in the set of matchings which are most robust to one-shot deviation.