Characterization of TU games with stable cores by nested balancedness

A balanced transferable utility game ( N , v ) has a stable core if its core is externally stable, that is, if each imputation that is not in the core is dominated by some core element. Given two payoff allocations x and y , we say that x outvotes y via some coalition S of a feasible set if x dominates y via S and x allocates at least v ( T ) to any feasible T that is not contained in S . It turns out that outvoting is transitive and the set M of maximal elements with respect to outvoting coincides with the core if and only if the game has a stable core. By applying the duality theorem of linear programming twice, it is shown that M coincides with the core if and only if a certain nested balancedness condition holds. Thus, it can be checked in finitely many steps whether a balanced game has a stable core. We say that the game has a super-stable core if each payoff vector that allocates less than v ( S ) to some coalition S is dominated by some core element and prove that core super-stability is equivalent to vital extendability, requiring that each vital coalition is extendable.