The Shapley-Shubik index was designed to evaluate the power distribution in committee systems drawing binary decisions and is one of the most established power indices. It was generalized to decisions with more than two levels of approval in the input and output. In the limit we have a continuum...

We examine the determinants of the EU budget expenditures allocation among different countries. In line with earlier literature, we consider two alternative explanations for the EU budget distribution: political power vs. needs view. Extending the original data set from Kauppi and Widgrén...

We consider the well-known one dimensional cutting stock problem (1CSP). Based on the pattern structure of the classical ILP formulation of Gilmore and Gomory, we can decompose the infinite set of 1CSP instances, with a fixed demand n, into a finite number of equivalence classes. We show up a...

The new voting system of the Council of the European Union cannot be represented as the intersection of six or fewer weighted games, i.e., its dimension is at least 7. This sets a new record for real-world voting bodies. A heuristic combination of different discrete optimization methods yields a...

Decisions in a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee are often modeled as a weighted game. Influence of a member is then measured by a power index. A large variety of different indices has been introduced in the literature. This paper analyzes how power indices differ with respect to...

Power index research has been a very active field over the past few decades. Will this continue or have all important questions been solved? We argue that there are still many opportunities to conduct useful research with and on power indices. Positive and normative questions remain, calling for...

Important decisions are likely made by groups of agents. Thus group decision making is very common in practice. Very transparent group aggregating rules are given by weighted voting, where each agent is assigned a weight. Here a proposal is accepted if the sum of the weights of the supporting...

Binary yes-no decisions in a legislative committee or a shareholder meeting are commonly modeled as a weighted game. However, there are noteworthy exceptions. E.g., the voting rules of the European Council according to the Treaty of Lisbon use a more complicated construction. Here we want to...