Voting power in voting situations is measured by the probability of changing decisions by altering the cast 'yes' or 'no' votes. Recently this analysis has been extended by strategic abstention. Abstention, just as 'yes' or 'no' votes can change decisions. This theory is often applied to...

A ranking of journals is manipulable if a particular journal's position can be improved by making additional citations to other journals. We introduce a simple ranking method that is not manipulable and is invariant to citation intensities, journal scaling and article-splitting. The ranking of...

The European Union used to make decisions by unanimity or near unanimity. After a series of extensions, with 27 member states the present decision making mechanisms have become very slow and assigned power to the members in an arbitrary way. The new decision rules accepted as part of the Lisbon...

A voting situation is given by a set of voters and the rules of legislation that determine minimal requirements for a group of voters to pass a motion. A priori measures of voting power, such as the Shapley-Shubik index and the Banzhaf value, show the influence of the individual players in a...

The evaluation of scientific output has a key role in the allocation of research funds and academic positions. Decisions are often based on quality indicators for academic journals and over the years a handful of scoring methods have been proposed for this purpose. Discussing the most prominent...

We study coalitional games where the coalitional payoffs depend on the entire coalition structure. We introduce a noncooperative, sequential coalition formation model and show that the set of equilibrium outcomes coincides with the recursive core, a generalisation of the core to such games. In...

Few elections attract so much attention as the Papal Conclave that elects the religious leader of over a billion Catholics worldwide. The Conclave is an interesting case of qualified majority voting with many participants and no formal voting blocks. Each cardinal is a well-known public gure...

In this paper we analyze the consequences of the fairness recommendation of the Venice Commission in allocating voting districts among larger administrative regions. This recommendation requires the size of any constituency not to differ from the average constituency size by more than a fixed...

An electrical transmission network consists of producers, consumers and the power lines connecting them. We build an ideal (lossless) DC load flow model as a cooperative game over a graph with the producers and consumers located at the nodes, each described by a maximum supply or desired demand...

A set of outcomes for a transferable utility game in characteristic function form is dominant if it is, with respect to an outsider-independent dominance relation, accessible (or admissible) and closed. This outsider-independent dominance relation is restrictive in the sense that a deviating...