THE POSTULATES OF GAME THEORY.

In their original exposition of the fundamental concepts of game theory, John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern followed a definitional procedure. That is, they defined the principal instruments of the theory and supplemented their definitions with what might be called plausible reasoning to support their choices of definitions. This paper presents postulates which are necessary and sufficient that a social decision process is cooperative game according to the formulation of von Neumann and Morgenstem. In the von Neumann-Morgenstern formulation of a cooperative game, and in its subsequent extensions, one has generally a set of individuals, certain subsets of which are called coalitions, and a set of possible outcomes for which the individuals' preferences are given. The object of the formulation is to establish a relation of social preference among the outcomes through consideration of the powers and preferences of the coalitions. The definitional procedure consists of three suppositions: first, that there are given exogenously certain rules of the game which specify the powers of the coalitions; second, that the preferences of a coalition are determined by the rule of unanimity among its members; and third, that social preference coincides with the conjunction of power and preference for some coalition.