ASSIGNMENT GAMES, CHROMATIC NUMBER, AND EXCHANGE THEORY

The exchange networks that social psychologists have studied can usefully be represented as game theoretic 2-sided assignment games. Conceiving of these networks as 2-sided assignment games opens up the possibility of studying N-sided assignment games and games without cores. 2-sided assignment games are special in that they always have cores, stable solutions in which every individual and subgroup behave rationally. The implicit assignment of positions to categories of an N-sided assignment game is related to coloring a graph. The color classes form sets of positions with potentially related interests. Color equivalence is compared to structural, regular, automorphic, and ecological positional equivalence.