Asymmetric majority pillage games

We study pillage games (Jordan in J Econ Theory 131(1):26–44, 2006), which model unstructured power contests. To enable empirical tests of pillage game theory, we relax a symmetry assumption that agents’ intrinsic contributions to a coalition’s power is identical. We characterise the core for all n. In the three-agent game: (i) only eight configurations are possible for the core, which contains at most six allocations; (ii) for each core configuration, the stable set is either unique or fails to exist; (iii) the linear power function creates a tension between a stable set’s existence and the interiority of its allocations, so that only special cases contain strictly interior allocations. Our analysis suggests that non-linear power functions may offer better empirical tests of pillage game theory.