Advances in the Theory of Large Cooperative Games and Applications to Club Theory: the Side Payments Case

In a series of papers (Kovalenkov and Wooders 2001a, Games and Economic Behavior, 2001b, Mathematics of Operations Research, and 1997, Journal of Economic Theory to appear), the authors have developed the framework of parameterized collections of games and also that of parameterized collections of economies with clubs. These papers apply to collections of games with nontransferable utility and similarly to economies with clubs and general preferences. The game theoretic framework encompasses the earlier `pregame' framework (cf., Wooders 1994b Econometrica) and also earlier models of economies with clubs and with possibly multiple memberships in clubs (cf. Shubik and Wooders 1982). In this paper, we consider the special case of games with side payments and illustrate the application of our more general results in this special, and much simpler but still important, framework. The motivation for this line of research is developed and application to environmental problems is discussed.