Stability concepts in bargaining games

In this thesis we discuss some novel concepts of stability in bargaining games, over a network setting. So far, the studies on bargaining games were done as profit sharing problems, whose underlying combinatorial optimization problems are of packing type. In our work, we study bargaining games from a cost sharing perspective, where the underlying combinatorial optimization problems are covering type problems. Unlike previous studies, where bargaining processes are restricted to only two players, we study bargaining games over a more generic hypergraph setting, which allows any bargaining process to be formed among any number of players. In previous studies of bargaining games, the objects that are being negotiated are assumed to be uniform and only the outcomes of the negotiations are allowed to be different. However, in our study, we accommodate possibilities of non-uniform weights of the objects that are being negotiated, which is closer to any real life scenario. Finally we extend our study to incorporate socially aware players by introducing a relaxed and innovative definition of stability.