Among the obligations facing a community of scholars is to make accessible to a wider community the ideas it finds useful and important. A related obligation is to recognize lasting contributions to ideas and to honor their progenitors. In this volume we undertake to fill part of both obligations.

The papers in this volume review and continue research that has grown out of a remarkable 1953 paper by Lloyd Shapley. There he proposed that it might be possible to evaluate, in a numerical way, the “value” of playing a game. The particular function he derived for this purpose, which has come to be called the Shapley value, has been the focus of sustained interest among students of cooperative game theory ever since. In the intervening years, the Shapley value has been interpreted and reinterpreted. Its domain has been extended and made more specialized. The same value function has been (re)derived from apparently quite different assumptions. And whole families of related value functions have been found to arise from relaxing various of the assumptions.

The reason the Shapley value has been the focus of so much interest is that it represents a distinct approach to the problems of complex strategic interaction that game theory seeks to illuminate.