A novel cooperative game between client and subcontractors based on technical characteristics

Large projects often have several activities which are performed by some subcontractors with several skills. Costs and time reduction and quality improvement of the project are very important for client and subcontractors. Therefore, in real large projects, subcontractors join together and form coalitions for improving the project profit. A key question is how an extra profit of cooperation among subcontractors should be assigned to them. This paper tries to address this question by proposing a cooperative game model based on technical characteristics of subcontractors. Technical characteristics of each contractor specify its value in the coalitions that it may join. Fair and appropriate allocation of profit among subcontractors is suggested by adopting cooperative game theory methods such as the Core method, Shapley method, Equal Profit Method (EPM) and the t-value.