Hervé Moulin

Over the past fifty years game theory has had a major impact on the field of economics. It was for work in game theory that the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded. Although non-cooperative game theory is better known, the theory of cooperative games has contributed a number of fundamental ideas to microeconomic analysis. Cooperative Microeconomics is the definitive textbook on these contributions. Designed to be used by undergraduate and graduate students, the book provides a thorough introduction and overview of its subject. Herve Moulin distinguishes among three primary modes of cooperation: cooperation by direct agreements; cooperation by just, equitable compromise; and cooperation by decentralized behavior. This tri-modal methodology is applied successively to the exchange of private goods, the fair division of unproduced commodities, the cooperative production of private and public goods, and cost-sharing.

"The book begins with the epistemological status of the axiomatic approach and the four classic principles of distributive justice: compensation, reward, exogenous rights, and fitness. It then presents the simple ideas of equal gains, equal losses, and proportional gains and losses. The book discusses there cardinal interpretations of collective welfare: Bentham's "utilitarian" proposal to maximize the sum of individual utilities, the Nash product, and the egalitarian leximin ordering. It also discusses the two main ordinal definitions of collective welfare: the majority relation and the Borda scoring method.". "The Shapley value is the single most important contribution of game theory to distributive justice. A formula to divide jointly produced costs or benefits fairly, it is especially useful when the pattern of externalities renders useless the simple ideas of equality and proportionality. The book ends with two versatile methods for dividing commodities efficiently and fairly when only ordinal preferences matter: competitive equilibrium with equal incomes and egalitarian equivalence. The book contains a wealth of empirical examples and exercises."--BOOK JACKET.