ABSTRACT
The model of cooperative games has an interesting history and an ambiguous status within economic theory. For the first two decades after Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s book (TGEB) (i.e. until the mid-1960s), the analysis of coalition formation and the search for stable agreements was the most active component of the emerging game theory. Subsequently the topic lost its prominence and research on cooperative games mainly followed two methodologically distinct paths: the first one, of a positive nature, explored the deep connections of core stability with the competitive equilibrium of exchange (or production) economies (the seminal work by Debreu and Scarf is dated 1963); the second one, of a normative nature, analyzed axiomatically a number of single-valued solutions such as the Shapley value and Nash’s solution to the bargaining problem (although the seminal papers by Nash and Shapley are dated 1950 and 1953 respectively, systematic research on axiomatic solutions did not start until the late 1960s).
