PROJECT MANAGEMENT GAMES

Abstract

This paper studies situations in which companies can cooperate in order to decrease the earliest completion time of a project that consists of several tasks. This is beneficial for the client who wants the project to be completed as early as possible. The client is willing to pay more for an earlier completion time. The total payoff must be allocated among the companies that cooperate. Cooperative game theory is used to model this situation. Conditions for the core of the game to be nonempty are derived. We study a class of project management games for which necessary and sufficient conditions for the nonemptiness of the core can be derived. We will show that a subset of the set of balanced project management games can be partitioned into a class of 1-convex games and a class of big boss games. Expressions for the extreme points of the core, the τ-value, the nucleolus, and the Shapley-value of games in these two classes are derived.