Pivotal players and the characterization of influence (Q1581192)

This paper considers an \(N\)-player game whose collective outcome may be influenced by players differently. The strategic behaviour in such games often depends on the individual players' beliefs about their influence on a collective outcome. In settings such as the provision of public goods and allocations in the presence of externalities, voting, implementation, auction and repeated games, only the players who believe their actions will be pivotal, take into account the impact of their actions on the collective outcome, whereas the other players tend to behave myopically. The authors provide tight upper bounds on the number of pivotal players and on average influence. These bounds are uniform over all mechanisms and actions profiles and the bounds are attained when the mechanism is a majority rule.