On Cooperative Games Related to Market Situations and Auctions

Abstract

We consider a market situation with two corners. One corner consists of a single seller with one object, and the other corner consists of potential buyers who all want the object. We suppose that the valuations of the object for the different buyers are known by all of them. Then two types of cooperative games, which we call market games and ring games, corresponding to such market situations are considered.

Market games are related to special total big boss games, while ring games are related to special convex games, the peer group games. It turns out that there exists a duality relation between the market game and the ring game arising from the same two-corner market situation. For both classes of games relevant solution concepts are studied.

Keywords: Market games, ring games, one-object auction situations, big boss games, peer group games