Cooperative Game Theory and Power Allocation
Summary
Cooperative game theory provides a formal framework for analysing how autonomous agents can form coalitions to achieve mutual benefits, and how the total gains or costs should be distributed among participants. Central to this framework is the characteristic function, which assigns a value to every possible coalition of players. Solution concepts such as the Shapley value, the core and bargaining solutions aim to ensure fairness, stability and efficiency in the allocation of resources or costs. In the context of power allocation, these methods have been applied to domains including electrical grid congestion management, wireless spectrum sharing, and network cost-sharing. Computational advances have yielded approximation algorithms to handle large player sets, while axiomatic studies continue to refine the properties that desirable allocation rules must satisfy. Practical implementations demonstrate that cooperative approaches can enhance system robustness, incentivise collaboration among network operators and promote equitable cost-sharing in decentralised infrastructures.
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Cooperative Game Theory and Power Allocation publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in cooperative game theory and power allocation across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Coalition: A subset of agents who cooperate to achieve a collective outcome.
Characteristic function: A mapping that assigns to each coalition a real value representing total worth or cost.
Shapley value: A unique allocation rule distributing total gains (or costs) based on each player’s average marginal contribution across all coalitions.
Transferable utility (TU): A setting in which utility can be freely redistributed among players without loss.
Marginal contribution: The incremental change in coalition value when a specific player joins.
References
- Sharing congestion management costs among system operators using the Shapley value. Applied Energy (2022).
- A review of cooperative rules and their associated algorithms for minimum-cost spanning tree problems. SERIEs (2021).
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