Multiplayer Allocations in the Presence of Diminishing Marginal Contributions: Cooperative Game Analysis and Applications in Management Science

We use cooperative game theory to investigate multiplayer allocation problems under the almost diminishing marginal contributions (ADMC) property. This property indicates that a player’s marginal contribution to a non-empty coalition decreases as the size of the coalition increases. We develop ADMC games for such problems and derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the core. When the core is non-empty, at least one extreme point exists, and the maximum number of extreme points is the total number of players. The Shapley value may not be in the core, which depends on the gap of each coalition. A player can receive a higher allocation based on the Shapley value in the core than based on the nucleolus, if the gap of the player is no greater than the gap of the complementary coalition. We also investigate the least core value for ADMC games with an empty core. To illustrate the applications of our results, we analyze a code-sharing game, a group buying game, and a scheduling profit game.