A Museum Cost Sharing Problem

Ginsburgh and Zang [1] consider a revenue sharing problem for the museum pass program, in which several museums jointly offer museum passes that allow visitors an unlimited access to participating museums in a certain period of time. We consider a cost sharing problem that can be regarded as the dual problem of the above revenue sharing problem. We assume that all museums are public goods and have various (e.g., service) costs. These costs must be shared by museum visitors. We propose a cost sharing method and provide an axiomatic characterization of the method. We then define a game for the problem and show that the cost sharing method is the Shapley value of the game. We also provide a comparative statics analysis for both the Shapley value of the museum pass game and the Shapley value for the cost sharing game when the number of museums and/or the number of visitors change.