On the number of blocks required to access the core

For any transferable utility game in coalitional form with nonempty core, we show that the number of blocks required to switch from an imputation out of the core to a core imputation is less than or equal to n(n?1)/2, where n is the number of players. This number considerably improves the bounds found by Kóczy (2006) [5] and Yang (2010) [11]. Our result relies on an altered version of the procedure proposed by Sengupta and Sengupta (1996) [9]. The use of the Davis-Maschler reduced-games is also pointed out.