On the serial cost sharing rule

Abstract

In this paper we study a solution for discrete cost allocation problems, namely, the serial cost sharing method. We show that this solution can be computed by applying the Shapley value to an appropriate TU game and we present a probabilistic formula. We also define for cost allocation problems a multilinear function in order to obtain the serial cost sharing method as Owen (1972) did for the Shapley value in the cooperative TU context. Moreover we show that the pseudo average cost method is equivalent to an extended Shapley value.