The Shapley group value

Following the original interpretation of the Shapley value (Shapley, 1953a) as a priori evaluation of the prospects of a player in a multi-person interaction situation, we propose a group value, which we call the Shapley group value, as a priori evaluation of the prospects of a group of players in a coalitional game when acting as a unit. We study its properties and we give an axiomatic characterization. Relaying on this valuation we analyze the profitability of a group. We motivate our proposal by means of some relevant applications of the Shapley group value, when it is used as an objective function by a decisionmaker who is trying to identify an optimal group of agents in a framework in which agents interact and the attained benefit can be modeled by means of a transferable utility game. As an illustrative example we analyze the problem of identifying the set of key agents in a terrorist network.