Bargaining power in communication networks

The aim of this paper is to determine how the place of a player in a network of communications affects her bargaining power with respect to the others. We adapt the Rubinstein-Stahl two-player noncooperative bargaining game of alternating offers to the case of n players connected through a graph. We show that this game has a unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium outcome from which we derive a bargaining power measure. This bargaining power measure satisfies properties of efficiency, anonymity, monotonicity, local impact, weighted fairness and fair reallocation that we define and discuss. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.