Coalitional Beliefs of Cournot Network Agents

In Network cooperative games, due to computational complexity issues, agents are not able to base their behavior on the “whole network status” but have to follow certain “beliefs” as to how it is in their strategic interest to act. This behavior constitutes the main interest of this paper. To this end, we quantify and characterize the set of beliefs that support cooperation of such agents. Assuming that they are engaged in a differentiated Cournot competition and that they equally split the worth produced, we characterize the set of coalitional beliefs that support core non-emptiness and thus guarantee stability of the Network.