The group identification literature mostly revolves around the problem of identifying individuals in the community who belong to groups with ethnic or religious identity. Here we use the same model framework to identify individuals who play key role in some sense. In particular we will focus on...

To ensure equal representation, the voting districts of a country must be more or less of the same size. Designing such voting districts, however, is not an easy task due to the fact that voting districts are encompassed in administrative regions. Since the respective share of an administrative...

Sum of Ranking Differences is an innovative statistical method that ranks competing solutions based on a reference point. The latter might arise naturally, or can be aggregated from the data. We provide two case studies to feature both possibilities. Apportionment and districting are two...

We investigate the impact and the possible consequences of the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. We model the European gas network as a cooperative game between regions as players over the pipeline network. Our model offers several novelties compared to earlier cooperative studies....

We aim to identify the most influential members of the Agricultural Committee of the European Parliament (COMAGRI). Unlike previous studies that were based on case studies or interviews with stakeholders, we analyse the voting power of MEPs using a spatial Banzhaf power index. We identify...

Sorting according to the gender or cognitive abilities of the traders has been investigated as a potential source of overpricing in asset markets. Here we study if sorting according to risk attitudes matters, motivated by the fact that filtering out risk-averse investors is practiced widely in...

Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the alternatives be compared pairwise to best approximate their...

Social networks play a fundamental role in the diffusion of innovation through peers’ influence on adoption. Thus, network position including a wide range of network centrality measures has been used to describe individuals’ affinity to adopt an innovation and their ability to propagate...

We provide a new modus operandi for the computation of the nucleolus in cooperative games with transferable utility. Using the concept of dual game we extend the theory of characterization sets. Dually essential and dually saturated coalitions determine both the core and the nucleolus in...