Interpretation of Aubin's fuzzy coalitions and their extensions. Relaxation of finite exchange economies (Q1338914)

\textit{J. P. Aubin} [`Mathematical methods of game and economic theory' (1979; Zbl 0452.90093)] introduced the notions of fuzzy coalition and fuzzy core for finite exchange economies. A fuzzy coalition can be interpreted as a coalition in which agents participate with certain shares of their resources. Aubin has shown that every allocation from the fuzzy core is an equilibrium allocation. The author considers the nonatomic economy canonically associated with a finite exchange economy. He proves that, if agents' preferences are convex, there is a one-to-one correspondence between the fuzzy core (in the sense of Aubin) of a finite economy and a subset of the (standard) core of the associated nonatomic economy. This approach provides a new interpretation of fuzzy coalitions as coalitions of a continuum economy. By using a well-known theorem of Aumann, the author also derives a variant of Aubin's result, namely that if preferences satisfy suitable conditions, an allocation belongs to the fuzzy core if and only if it is an equilibrium allocation. In order to deal with nonconvex preferences, the author introduces a new notion of fuzzy coalitions, which yields Aubin's fuzzy core in the convex case. This generalized notion of fuzzy coalition allows the author to extend the equivalence between equilibrium allocations and fuzzy core to the nonconvex case.