Speaker:     Kerry Manson
Affiliation: The University of Auckland
Title:       Power Indices and their Real-World Application
Date:        Tuesday, 8 Apr 2014
Time:        5:00 pm
Location:    Room 412, Science Centre (303)

It has been recognised that standard, a priori power indices do not describe political power
well in many real-world situations. This lowers our ability to usefully incorporate the effects of
power distribution into political analyses. Methods of a posteriori power measurement which
take into account restrictions on the set of allowable coalitions are examined and developed. A
Hasse diagram representation of games is used to give a new method for adapting any a priori
Banzhaf index to a restricted coalition structure. A modified Banzhaf index is further analysed, and the
conditions for manipulation of this index by players are given.

The talk is based on Kerry’s Honours dissertation written in 2013.