Cooperative vehicular networks will play a vital role in the coming years to implement various intelligent transportation-related applications. Both vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications will be needed to reliably disseminate information in a vehicular network. In this regard, a roadside unit (RSU) equipped with multiple antennas can improve the network capacity. While the traditional approaches assume antennas to experience independent fading, we consider a more practical uplink scenario where antennas at the RSU experience correlated fading. In particular, we evaluate the packet error probability for two renowned antenna correlation models, i.e., constant correlation (CC) and exponential correlation (EC). We also consider intermediate cooperative vehicles for reliable communication between the source vehicle and the RSU. Here, we derive closed-form expressions for packet error probability which help quantify the performance variations due to fading parameter, correlation coefficients and the number of intermediate helper vehicles. To evaluate the optimal transmit power in this network scenario, we formulate a Stackelberg game, wherein, the source vehicle is treated as a buyer and the helper vehicles are the sellers. The optimal solutions for the asking price and the transmit power are devised which maximize the utility functions of helper vehicles and the source vehicle, respectively. We verify our mathematical derivations by extensive simulations in MATLAB.