Handling Exponentially Growing Strategies in Spatial Cooperative Games: The Case of the European Union

This paper introduces a comprehensive cooperative game theory framework to measure the significance of location and neighborhood relations in conjunction with the magnitude of players/parties. The significances of these relations are measured over the EU geography. In this case, there are (i) the test of availability of a core solution that satisfies all associated parties/players; (ii) the measurement of players’/parties’ rational minimal and maximal return expectations from the grand coalition regarding their all individual and sub-group strategies and associated return rationalities; (iii) the determination of the critical players/parties in the grand coalition. The study’s main contributions are the provision of a methodology that identifies spatially/geographically critical players/parties and the design of an algorithm for handling exponentially growing strategies alongside increasing numbers of players/parties. In sum, a comprehensive cooperative game theory framework is introduced to measure the significance of location and neighborhood relations in conjunction with the magnitude of the players/parties. The case of the EU has revealed the union’s geographically critical countries, with Germany being found to be the most influential.