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...

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...

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...

Measuring risk can be axiomatized by the concept of coherent measures of risk. A risk environment specifies some individual portfolios' realization vectors and a coherent measure of risk. We consider sharing the risk of the aggregate portfolio by studying transferable utility cooperative games:...

In coalitional games with uncertain payoffs, a deviating coalition can only form expectations regarding its post-deviation payoff. Classical approaches address the problem from the side of conservatism, expecting the worst, or by explicit assumptions of the emerging state of the world. We borrow...

We provide two new characterizations of exact games. First, a game is exact if and only if it is exactly balanced; and second, a game is exact if and only if it is totally balanced and overbalanced.The condition of exact balancedness is identical to the one of balancedness, except that one of the...