The Shapley group value

Abstract

Following the original interpretation of the Shapley value (Shapley, 1953a) as a priori evaluation of the prospects of a player in a multi-person iteraction situation, we propose a group value, which we call the Shapley group value, as a priori evaluation of the prospects of a group of players in a coalitional game when acting as a unit. We study its properties and we give an axiomatic characterization. We motivate our proposal by means of some relevant applications of the Shapley group value, when it is used as an objective function by a decision maker who is trying to identify an optimal group of agents in a framework in which agents interact and the attained benefit can be modeled by means of a transferable utility game. As an illustrative example we analyze the problem of identifying the set of key agents in a terrorist network.