The Stability of Hedonic Coalition Structures

doi:10.1006/game.2001.0877

Games and Economic Behavior

Volume 38, Issue 2, February 2002, Pages 201-230

https://doi.org/10.1006/game.2001.0877 Get rights and content

Abstract

We consider the partitioning of a society into coalitions in purely hedonic settings, i.e., where each player's payoff is completely determined by the identity of other members of her coalition. We first discuss how hedonic and nonhedonic settings differ and some sufficient conditions for the existence of core stable coalition partitions in hedonic settings. We then focus on a weaker stability condition: individual stability, where no player can benefit from moving to another coalition while not hurting the members of that new coalition. We show that if coalitions can be ordered according to some characteristic over which players have single-peaked preferences, or where players have symmetric and additively separable preferences, then there exists an individually stable coalition partition. Examples show that without these conditions, individually stable coalition partitions may not exist. We also discuss some other stability concepts, and the incompatibility of stability with other normative properties. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C71, A14, D20.

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^☆: Financial support under NSF Grant SBR 9507912 is gratefully acknowledged. We thank Salvador Barbera, Gabrielle Demange, Joseph Greenberg, Michel Le Breton, and Shlomo Weber for very helpful conversations and suggestions. We are also grateful for the comments of two anonymous referees that have helped in the rewriting of the paper.

²: [email protected].

³: [email protected].

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Regular ArticleThe Stability of Hedonic Coalition Structures☆

Abstract

J. Math. Econ.

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

J. Econ. Theory

Strategy-Proofness and the Coalition Formation Problem

Core in a Simple Coalition Formation Game

Social Choice Welfare

Coalition Formation Games with Separable Preferences

Hedonic Coalitions: Optimality and Stability

Econometrica

Regular Article
The Stability of Hedonic Coalition Structures☆