Cooperation, compensation and transition

Cooperation and compensation are two important and well-linked issues in economics. The central question in cooperation is how to share the joint gains among participating players. Compensation is a specific aspect of surplus sharing problems providing incentives for agents to sacrifice their own direct interests to obtain higher payoffs for the coalition as a whole. This thesis first introduces and analyses a new solution concept, the consensus value, for cooperative games with transferable utility in characteristic function form and generalises it to partition function form games. These ideas and concepts are used to analyse several problems of loss compensation and surplus sharing: the general framework of project-allocation situations and the problem of externality-associated compensations within the new model of primeval games. Finally, transition by compensation is analysed in the framework of transition economies and, in particular, in the reform process of China.