On Harsanyi Dividends and Asymmetric Values

Abstract

The concept of dividend in transferable utility games was introduced by Harsanyi [1959], offering a unifying framework for studying various valuation concepts, from the Shapley value to the different notions of values introduced by Weber. Using the decomposition of the characteristic function used by Shapley to prove uniqueness of his value, the idea of Harsanyi was to associate to each coalition a dividend to be distributed among its members to define an allocation. Many authors have contributed to that question. We offer a synthesis of their work, with a particular attention to restrictions on dividend distributions, starting with the seminal contributions of Vasil’ev, Hammer, Peled and Sorensen and Derks, Haller and Peters, until the recent papers of van den Brink, van der Laan and Vasil’ev.