Potential approach and characterizations of a Shapley value in multi-choice games

The main focus of this paper is on the restricted Shapley value for multi-choice games introduced by Derks and Peters [Derks, J., Peters, H., 1993. A Shapley value for games with restricted coalitions. International journal of Game Theory 21, 351-360] and studied by Klijn et al. [Klijn, F., Slikker, M., Zazuelo, J., 1999. Characterizations of a multi-choice value. International journal of Game Theory 28, 521-532]. We adopt several characterizations from TU game theory and reinterpret them in the framework of multi-choice games. We generalize the potential approach and show that this solution can be formulated as the vector of marginal contributions of a potential function. Also, we characterize the family of all solutions for multi-choice games that admit a potential. Further, a consistency result is reported. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.