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Game Theory in Action: Coalition Bargaining in Germany’s 2025 Bundestag Election
The ultimate outcome of the 2025 Bundestag election has yielded a coalition environment that is dominated bilaterally by CDU/CSU and SPD. Looking at the results of the elections, CDU/CSU is in the forefront with 208 seats (28.52%), followed by AfD with 152 seats (20.8%), SPD with 120 seats (16.41%), and the Greens with 85 seats (11.61%). Die Linke garnered 64 seats (8.77%), and SSW has only one seat (0.15%). Notably, BSW (4.97%) and FDP (4.33%) failed to gain representation in the Bundestag. This means that CDU/CSU and SPD are the sole potential coalition partners under these results, with a total of 328 seats, enough to form a government. By this, it is a two-player coalition bargaining game, and bargaining strength must be based on interdependency, not simply the count of seats.
Bilateral Monopoly and the Core: An Examination of the CDU/CSU’s inability to Dominate
In cooperative game theory, the formation of coalitions relies on the core, which is a collection of stable imputations in which no coalition of players will have the incentive to deviate. Since…
