On Decomposition of Solutions for Coalitional Games

Abstract: A solution concept on a class of transferable utility coalitional games is a multifunction satisfying given criteria of economic rationality. Every solution associates a set of payoff allocations with a coalitional game. This general definition specializes to a number of well-known concepts such as the core, Shapley value, nucleolus etc. In this note it is shown that in many cases a solution factors through a set of games whose members can be viewed as elementary building blocks for the solution. Two factoring maps have a very simply structure. The first decomposes a game into its elementary components and the second one combines the output of the first map into the respective solution outcome. The decomposition is then studied mainly for certain polyhedral cones of zero-normalized games.