COALITION FORMATION AND BARGAINING PROTOCOLS: A REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

This paper offers a review of the vast literature regarding bargaining and coalition formation. This topic has been generally described as the attempt to provide strategic foundations to cooperative solution concepts. It can therefore be seen as the linking ring between the non-cooperative and the cooperative game-theoretic approach to coalition formation. Its central role in economic theory and its relatively long history that goes back to the Nash program have fostered a large academic production, including surveys. Nonetheless, this paper will focus on an aspect that is often neglected in the dedicated surveys: the specificities of the bargaining protocols leading to different outcomes. Although generally downgraded to the rank of details, the differences in bargaining protocols, even when minor, can cause significant changes in fundamental aspects such as the possibility to reach full cooperation, the distribution of final pay-offs and the time taken to reach an agreement. Focused on externalities-free games, therefore on bargaining protocols sustaining solution concepts for cooperative games in characteristic function form, the paper aims at providing a brief but exhaustive review of the topic that could result in a very useful tool for any researcher approaching the subject of coalitional bargaining.