Research assessment: A contribution to solving the publication credit allocation problem

In allocation problems, a given set of goods are assigned to agents in such a way that the social welfare is maximised, that is, the largest possible global worth is achieved. When goods are indivisible, it is possible to use money compensation to perform a fair allocation taking into account the actual contribution of all agents to the social welfare. Coalitional games provide a formal mathematical framework to model such problems, in particular the Shapley value is a solution concept widely used for assigning worths to agents in a fair way. Unfortunately, computing this value is a #P-hard problem, so that applying this good theoretical notion is often quite difficult in real-world problems.