The Dutch drinking water sector experienced two drastic changes over the last 10 years. Firstly, in 1997, the sector association started with a voluntary benchmarking aimed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the sector. Secondly, merger activity arose. This paper develops a tailored...

Building on a model of the interaction of risk-averse frms that compete in forward and spot markets, we develop an empirical strategy to test whether oligopolistic frms use forward contracts for strategic motives, for risk-hedging, or for both. An increase in the number of players weakens the...

A situation in which a finite set of players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation can be described by a cooperative game with transferable utility, or simply a TU-game. A solution for TU-games assigns a set of payoff distributions (possibly empty or consisting of a unique element) to every...

Recently, applications of cooperative game theory to economic allocation problems have gained popularity. In many such allocation problems, such as river games, queueing games and auction games, the game is totally positive (i.e., all dividends are nonnegative), and there is some hierarchical...

A situation in which a finite set of players can obtain certain payoffs by cooperation can be described by a cooperative game with transferable utility, or simply a TU-game. A (single-valued) solution for TU-games assigns a payoff distribution to every TU-game. A well-known solution is the...

One of the main issues in economics is the trade-off between marginalism and egalitarianism. In the context of cooperative games this trade-off can be framed as one of choosing to allocate according to the Shapley value or the equal division solution. In this paper we provide tools that make it...

Recently, cooperative game theory has been applied to various economic allocation problems in which players are not fully anonymous but belong to some relational structure. One of the most developed models in this respect are communications situations or (symmetric) network situations in which...

In this paper we consider the problem of the control of access to a firm's productive asset, embedding the relevant decision makers into a general structure of formal authority relations. Within such an authority structure, each decision maker acts as a principal to some decision makers, while...

Cooperative games with partial cooperation cover a wider rank of real world situations than the classic model of cooperative games where every subset of a set of agents can form a coalition to execute the game. In this paper, the set of feasible coalitions which models the partial cooperation...

A situation in which a finite set of agents can generate certain payoffs by cooperation can be described by a cooperative game with transferable utility (or simply a TU-game) where each agent is represented by one player in the game. In this paper, we assume that one agent can be represented by...