Epsilon cores of games with limited side payments nonemptiness and equal treatment (Q5954064)

The authors introduce the concept of games with limited side payment, with an eye to situations in which side payments may be made freely only within small groups of players. To quote from the authors' introduction, ``Side payments are limited by the requirement that groups of players bounded in size, without making transfers between themselves, can achieve almost all feasible gains to collective activities. The \(\epsilon\)-core consists of those feasible payoffs that cannot be improved upon by at least \(\epsilon\) for each member of any coalition.'' Two players are approximately of the same type if they make similar contributions to coalitions, and among the parameters in the collections of games considered are the bounds on the number of approximate player types, a bound on the size of ``nearly effective groups'' of players and their distances from exact effectiveness. The results contribute to the investigation of ``market-like'' properties of large games under conditions limiting returns to group size.