Importance in systems with interval decisions

Abstract

Given a system where the real-valued states of the agents are aggregated by a function to a real-valued state of the entire system, we are interested in the influence or importance of the different agents for that function. This generalizes the notion of power indices for binary voting systems to decisions over interval policy spaces and has applications in economics, engineering, security analysis, and other disciplines. Here, we study the question of importance in systems with interval decisions. Based on the classical Shapley-Shubik and Penrose-Banzhaf index, from binary voting, we motivate and analyze two importance measures. Additionally, we present some results for parametric classes of aggregation functions.