On the Felsenthal power index

Abstract

The paper that introduces the Felsenthal index is titled: ‘A well-behaved index of a priori P-Power for simple n-person games.’ In 2016, Felsenthal introduced his index for simple games. His definition does not base on the axiomatic approach. Then, Felsenthal regarded some properties and proved that his index satisfies a list of six reasonable and compelling postulates. Three of the properties that he regarded refer to the weighted games, but this fact does not reduce the definition of his index to weighted games. He proves that none of seven well-known efficient power indices proposed to date satisfies the list of postulates, indicating for each of them which of the six postulates violate. In this paper we extend some of his postulates, originally defined for weighted games, to simple games. The main objective of the article is to answer three open questions motivated in his article. In particular, we prove that his index may not be the unique one fulfilling the six proposed postulates, provide an axiomatic characterization for his index and, propose an impossibility result, which is obtained by adding a new postulate to a sublist of the postulates he considered. We also remark the existence of some alternative compelling postulates which are not satisfied for the index.

This research is part of the I+D+i project PID2019-104987GB-I00 supported by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/. We thank José María Alonso-Meijide for his comments and suggestions, which helped us to improve the manuscript. We greatly appreciate the comments of two referees that have contributed to improve this work.

Peer Reviewed

Postprint (published version)