Auman and Maschler tried to establish what is the right
payoff to the members of a coalition. They went about it
by enlarging upon the concept of bargaining (threats,
bluffs, offers and counter-offers). Every imputation was
examined, separately, whether it belongs in the solution
(=yields the highest ranked outcome) or not, regardless of
the other imputations in the solution. But in their theory,
every member had the right to "object" to the inclusion of
other members in the coalition by suggesting a different,
exclusionary, coalition in which the members stand to
gain a larger payoff. The player about to be excluded can
"counter-argue" by demonstrating the existence of yet
another coalition in which the members will get at least as
much as in the first coalition and in the coalition proposed
by his adversary, the "objector". Each coalition has, at
least, one solution.
The Game in GT is an idealized concept. Some of the
assumptions can - and should be argued against. The
number of agents in any game is assumed to be finite and
a finite number of steps is mostly incorporated into the
assumptions. Omissions are not treated as acts (though
negative ones). All agents are negligible in their
relationship to others (have no discernible influence on
them) - yet are influenced by them (their strategies are not
- but the specific moves that they select - are). The
comparison of utilities is not the result of any ranking -
because no universal ranking is possible. Actually, no
ranking common to two or n players is possible (rankings
are bound to differ among players). Many of the problems
are linked to the variant of rationality used in GT. It is
comprised of a clarity of preferences on behalf of the
rational agent and relies on the people's tendency to
converge and cluster around the right answer / move.
This, however, is only a tendency. Some of the time,
players select the wrong moves. It would have been much
wiser to assume that there are no pure strategies, that all
of them are mixed. Game Theory would have done well to
borrow mathematical techniques from quantum
mechanics. For instance: strategies could have been
described as wave functions with probability distributions.
The same treatment could be accorded to the cardinal
utility function. Obviously, the highest ranking (smallest
ordinal) preference should have had the biggest
probability attached to it - or could be treated as the
collapse event. But these are more or less known, even
trivial, objections. Some of them cannot be overcome. We
must idealize the world in order to be able to relate to it
scientifically at all. The idealization process entails the
incorporation of gross inaccuracies into the model and the
ignorance of other elements. The surprise is that the
approximation yields results, which tally closely with
reality - in view of its mutilation, affected by the model.
There are more serious problems, philosophical in nature.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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