Speaker:    Mark C. Wilson
Affiliation: The University of Auckland
Title:       Decisiveness, power, and value
Date:        Tuesday, 10 May, 2011
Time:        4:00 pm
Location:    Room 6115, Owen G. Glenn Building

The connection between individual contribution and collective value  has been studied in the framework of cooperative (coalitional) games with transferable utility, most famously in terms of the Shapley value which has led to a general theory of “values”. In the special case of simple games, the concept of (voting) power has been studied, most famously by Banzhaf, again leading to a substantial literature, with more controversy than in the TU game case. In each case, there is a collective notion which yields the individual one in a straightforward way, and which is less understood than the individual one. I will attempt to give a unified presentation of  all these ideas and their relationships, with the aim of shedding some light on some arguments over definitions of power and pointing the way to further research. This is a preliminary discussion of several possible papers in progress with Geoff Pritchard and Reyhaneh Reyhani. Audience contributions are encouraged.