Cooperative games of choosing partners and forming coalitions in the marketplace

Two games of interacting between a coalition of players in a marketplace and the residual players acting there are discussed, along with two approaches to fair imputation of gains of coalitions in cooperative games that are based on the concepts of the Shapley vector and core of a cooperative game. In the first game, which is an antagonistic one, the residual players try to minimize the coalitionʹs gain, whereas in the second game, which is a noncooperative one, they try to maximize their own gain as a coalition. A meaningful interpretation of possible relations between gains and Nash equilibrium strategies in both games considered as those played between a coalition of firms and its surrounding in a particular marketplace in the framework of two classes of n-person games is presented. A particular class of games of choosing partners and forming coalitions in which models of firms operating in the marketplace are those with linear constraints and utility functions being sums of linear and bilinear functions of two corresponding vector arguments is analyzed, and a set of maximin problems on polyhedral sets of connected strategies which the problem of choosing a coalition for a particular firm is reducible to are formulated based on the firm models of the considered kind.