Uncoupled Aspiration Adaptation Dynamics Into the Core

Dynamics for play of transferable-utility cooperative games are proposed that require information regarding own payoff experiences and other players’ past actions, but not regarding other players’ payoffs. The proposed dynamics provide an evolutionary interpretation of the proto-dynamic ‘blocking argument’ (Edgeworth, 1881) based on the behavioral principles of ‘aspiration adaptation’ (Sauermann and Selten, 1962) instead of best response. If the game has a non-empty core, the dynamics are absorbed into the core in finite time with probability one. If the core is empty, the dynamics cycle infinitely through all coalitions.

Committee Decisions under Majority Rule Revisited

Spatial committee decision-making experiments provide ample evidence for the predictive power of the majority rule core if it is not empty. Furthermore, an empty core does not substantively reduce the stability of majority decision making. In this article, I put these two findings to a critical test using two preference configurations from Fiorina's and Plott's (1978) seminal committee experiments. In my experiment, committees with fixed individual preferences make multiple decisions over time. Contrary to the existing evidence, I find that results diverge from the core in the course of the experiment. In line with previous research, an empty core has no noticeable behavioral effects.

DOMAIN EXTENSIONS OF THE ERLANG LOSS FUNCTION: THEIR SCALABILITY AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO COOPERATIVE GAMES

We prove that several extensions of the classic Erlang loss function to non-integral numbers of servers are scalable: the blocking probability as described by the extension decreases when the offered load and the number of servers s are increased with the same relative amount, even when scaling up from integral s to non-integral s. We use this to prove that when several Erlang loss systems pool their resources for efficiency, various corresponding cooperative games have a non-empty core.