On $\alpha$-roughly weighted games

Abstract

Gvozdeva, Hemaspaandra, and Slinko (2011) have introduced three hierarchies for simple games in order to measure the distance of a given simple game to the class of (roughly) weighted voting games. Their third class $\mathcal{C}_\alpha$ consists of all simple games permitting a weighted representation such that each winning coalition has a weight of at least 1 and each losing coalition a weight of at most $\alpha$. For a given game the minimal possible value of $\alpha$ is called its critical threshold value. We continue the work on the critical threshold value, initiated by Gvozdeva et al., and contribute some new results on the possible values for a given number of voters as well as some general bounds for restricted subclasses of games. A strong relation beween this concept and the cost of stability, i.e. the minimum amount of external payment to ensure stability in a coalitional game, is uncovered.