Measurement of social power in n-person reciprocal power situations

This paper tries to extend the concepts of amount of power and strength of power to n-person reciprocal power situations, where all n participants have some power over one another and over the joint policies of their group. Intuitively, the amount of a person's power is a measure of the probability of his being able to achieve adoption of joint policies agreeing with his own preferences; while the strength of his power is a measure of the strength of the incentives he can provide for the other participants to agree to his policy proposals, and more generally, the strength of his bargaining position against the other participants. To define the strength of power the paper uses the author's bargaining model for the n-person game. The measure obtained in this way can be regarded as a generalization of the power measure of Shapley and Shubik.