My game theory is a bit rusty but I remember the pareto frontier as referring to an equal overall utility condition while a pareto improvement requires no participant becoming worse off. In other words you can move along the frontier by negatively impacting other players (which means by not making pareto improvements). This situation makes the players adversaries because there are no longer, strictly speaking, benefits from cooperating.
You’re thinking of a Kaldor-Hicks optimality frontier for {outcomes with maximal total payoff}, while the Pareto frontier is {maximal elements in the unanimous-agreement preference ordering over outcomes}.
My game theory is a bit rusty but I remember the pareto frontier as referring to an equal overall utility condition while a pareto improvement requires no participant becoming worse off. In other words you can move along the frontier by negatively impacting other players (which means by not making pareto improvements). This situation makes the players adversaries because there are no longer, strictly speaking, benefits from cooperating.
You’re thinking of a Kaldor-Hicks optimality frontier for {outcomes with maximal total payoff}, while the Pareto frontier is {maximal elements in the unanimous-agreement preference ordering over outcomes}.