A Family of Position Values for Directed Communication Situations

Abstract

In this paper, we define a family of values for directed communication situations that are inspired by the position value. We use the concept of directed communication and related connectedness in directed graphs, under which a coalition of players in a game can only cooperate if these players form a directed path in a directed communication graph. By defining an arc game, which assesses the worth of coalitions of (directed) arcs in generating worth, we allocate the Shapley value payoff of each arc over the nodes incident with this arc, where we allow the head and tail to obtain a different share in this arc payoff. However, the way that the arc payoff is shared over its head and tail is uniform over all arcs. We characterize these values by connection efficiency and a modification of the classical balanced link contributions property for undirected communication situations, discriminating between the roles of the nodes as head and tail.