This paper introduces a new approach to identifying and operationalizing the business political connections of banks.  We manually collect data on 2,598 bankers who owned or worked in 115 Russian banks from 2015 to 2021 and use this dataset to describe the types of political connections of Russian banks and to unveil their institutional patterns by applying cluster analysis. We confirm the widespread and heterogeneous nature of political connections in the Russian banking sector and provide a more detailed understanding of the degree of penetration of political interests into the activities of banks. We propose and explore a set of variables catching the origins, relevance, and maturity of political connections which produce additional variation among banks and could be used to facilitate a better and more theoretically grounded assessment of the effects of political connections on the business choices and the financial performance of banks.

In weighted congestion games, players’ weights and resource functions are predefined. This way, they can be applied for modeling traffic intensity, exploring market competition, and analyzing other problems with a congestion effect. In some normal-form games however, players’ weights and resource functions are not defined explicitly and players may be unaware of their existence. This article finds the necessary and sufficient conditions for representing a normal-form game as a weighted congestion game. Axioms are formulated that guarantee there exist positive weights of players and positive-definite resource functions. It is proved that a normal-form game satisfies the axioms of Positivity and the Independence of Irrelevant Choices (Konishi et al., 1997) if and only if it is a singleton weighted congestion game. This result indicates that the payoff functions of players in hedonic games are represented in the form of a weighted congestion game. It is demonstrated that a normal-form game satisfies the axioms of Non-Negativity, Transfer, Resource Marginal Contribution, and the Independence of Irrelevant Choices if and only if it is a full weighted congestion game with player-independent resource functions.