Connecting the cooperative and competitive structures of the multiple-partners assignment game

Multiple-partners assignment game is the name used by Sotomayor [The multiple partners game, in: M. Majumdar (Ed.), Equilibrium and Dynamics: Essays in Honor of David Gale, The Macmillan Press Ltd., NewYork, 1992; The lattice structure of the set of stable outcomes of the multiple partners assignment game, Int. J. GameTheory 28 (1999) 567–583] to describe the cooperative structure of the many-to-manymatching market with additively separable utilities. Stability concept is proved to be different from the core concept. An economic structure is proposed where the concept of competitive equilibrium payoff is introduced in connection to the equilibrium concept from standard microeconomic theory. The paper examines how this equilibrium concept compares with the cooperative equilibrium concept. Properties of interest to the cooperative and competitive markets are derived. © 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL classification: C78; D78