Bondareva–Shapley theorem

The Bondareva–Shapley theorem, in game theory, describes a necessary and sufficient condition for the non-emptiness of the core of a cooperative game in characteristic function form. Specifically, the game's core is non-empty if and only if the game is balanced. The Bondareva–Shapley theorem implies that market games and convex games have non-empty cores. The theorem was formulated independently by Olga Bondareva and Lloyd Shapley in the 1960s.

Let the pair ${\displaystyle \;\langle N,v\rangle \;}$ be a cooperative game in characteristic function form, where ${\displaystyle \;\;N\;}$ is the set of players and where the value function ${\displaystyle \;v:2^{N}\to \mathbb {R} \;}$ is defined on ${\displaystyle N}$'s power set (the set of all subsets of ${\displaystyle N}$).
The core of ${\displaystyle \;\langle N,v\rangle \;}$ is non-empty if and only if for every function ${\displaystyle \alpha :2^{N}\setminus \{\emptyset \}\to [0,1]}$ where
${\displaystyle \forall i\in N:\sum _{S\in 2^{N}:\;i\in S}\alpha (S)=1}$
the following condition holds:

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