Triangular Fuzzy Number-Typed Fuzzy Cooperative Games and Their Application to Rural E-Commerce Regional Cooperation and Profit Sharing

The primary aim of this paper is to develop one kind of easy and effective method to solve fuzzy cooperative games with coalition values expressed by triangular fuzzy numbers (TFNs). This method ensures that each player should receive a TFN-typed fuzzy pay-off from the grand coalition because each coalition value is expressed by a TFN. Using the concept of Alpha-cut sets, an arbitrary TFN’s Alpha-cut set can be shown as an interval. If the 1-cut sets and 0-cut sets of the TFN-typed coalition values are known, we can easily gain some important values, such as the means, the lower limits, and the upper limits of the TFN-typed payoffs via the proposed quadratic programming models and method. Furthermore, it is also easy for us to compute the lower and upper limits of Alpha-cut sets at any confidence levels of the TFN-typed payoffs for any TFN-typed cooperative game through solving the constructed quadratic programming models. Hereby the players’ TFN-typed payoffs for the TFN-typed cooperative game can be explicitly solved via the representation theorem for fuzzy sets. It is easy to prove that the proposed solutions of the fuzzy cooperative games with coalition values expressed by TFNs satisfy some useful and important properties, such as symmetry, additivity, and anonymity. Finally, the validity, applicability and advantages of the proposed method is proved and discussed through a numerical example.