On the closest balanced game

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: García-Segador, Pedro, Grabisch, Michel, Mermoud, Dylan Laplace, Miranda, Pedro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author García-Segador, Pedro
Grabisch, Michel
Mermoud, Dylan Laplace
Miranda, Pedro
author_facet García-Segador, Pedro
Grabisch, Michel
Mermoud, Dylan Laplace
Miranda, Pedro
contents Cooperative games with nonempty core are called balanced, and the set of balanced games is a polyhedron. Given a game with empty core, we look for the closest balanced game, in the sense of the (weighted) Euclidean distance, i.e., the orthogonal projection of the game on the set of balanced games. Besides an analytical approach which becomes rapidly intractable, we propose a fast algorithm to find the closest balanced game, avoiding exponential complexity for the optimization problem, and being able to run up to 20 players. We show experimentally that the probability that the closest game has a core reduced to a singleton tends to 1 when the number of players grow. We provide a mathematical proof that the proportion of facets whose games have a non-singleton core tends to 0 when the number of players grow, by finding an expression of the aymptotic growth of the number of minimal balanced collections. This permits to prove mathematically the experimental result. Consequently, taking the core of the projected game defines a new solution concept, which we call least square core due to its analogy with the least core, and our result shows that the probability that this is a point solution tends to 1 when the number of players grow.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_15318
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the closest balanced game
García-Segador, Pedro
Grabisch, Michel
Mermoud, Dylan Laplace
Miranda, Pedro
Computer Science and Game Theory
91A12 - Cooperative games
Cooperative games with nonempty core are called balanced, and the set of balanced games is a polyhedron. Given a game with empty core, we look for the closest balanced game, in the sense of the (weighted) Euclidean distance, i.e., the orthogonal projection of the game on the set of balanced games. Besides an analytical approach which becomes rapidly intractable, we propose a fast algorithm to find the closest balanced game, avoiding exponential complexity for the optimization problem, and being able to run up to 20 players. We show experimentally that the probability that the closest game has a core reduced to a singleton tends to 1 when the number of players grow. We provide a mathematical proof that the proportion of facets whose games have a non-singleton core tends to 0 when the number of players grow, by finding an expression of the aymptotic growth of the number of minimal balanced collections. This permits to prove mathematically the experimental result. Consequently, taking the core of the projected game defines a new solution concept, which we call least square core due to its analogy with the least core, and our result shows that the probability that this is a point solution tends to 1 when the number of players grow.
title On the closest balanced game
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
91A12 - Cooperative games
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15318