This work initiates the study of cost-sharing mechanisms that, in addition to the usual incentive compatibility conditions, make it disadvantageous for the users to employ pseudonyms. We show that this is possible only if all serviced users pay the same price, which implies that such mechanisms do not exist even for certain subadditive cost functions. In practice, a user can increase her utilit...

Multiple cost sharing rules often coexist in seemingly identical environments. We use shared irrigation costs as a context for examining the extent to which the structural environment explains the selection of a cost-sharing rule. We find that environmental factors affecting the costs and benefits derived from irrigation, as well as those determining the distribution of irrigators along the irr...

Units of a good are produced at some symmetric cost. A mechanism elicits agents’ willingness to pay for one unit of the good, allocates some goods to some agents, and covers the cost by charging those agents. We introduce the generalized average cost mechanism (GAC) for arbitrary symmetric cost functions. GAC is the only Pareto selection among group strategyproof mechanisms that treat equal age...

As health reform drives the largest expansion of health insurance since Medicare and policy-makers grapple with how to slow the increase in health care spending, cost-sharing--the division of health care costs between patients and insurers--is considered an important tool. This synthesis reviews the evidence on cost-sharing. Key findings include: Research consistently shows demand for health ca...

Consider a scenario where a service is provided to a set of users at a certain net cost. A natural question to ask is, how should one divide the cost amongst the users, i.e., what is a good pricing policy or a cost sharing scheme? Formally, let U be the set of users and C be the cost function that assigns a service cost C(S) to each S ⊆ U . It may help to keep the example of an internet service...

We study environments where a production process is jointly shared by a finite group of agents. The social decision involves the determination of input contribution and output distribution. We define a competitive solution when there is decreasing-returns-to-scale which leads to a Pareto optimal outcome. Since there is a finite number of agents, the competitive solution is prone to manipulation...

To fix ideas, we can think of the graph as a public transportation network, where each edge represents a bus route connecting two stations. The n players can be thought of as employees that want to commute from their home stations si to a company located at station t. Assume that the operation of each route requires a fixed amount of money, say one unit of cost, which people using that route ca...

Relaxations based on (either complete or partial) ignoring delete effects of the actions provide the basis for some seminal classical planning heuristics. However, the palette of the conceptual tools exploited by these heuristics remains rather limited. We study a framework for approximating the optimal cost solutions for problems with no delete effects that bridges between certain works on heu...

Consumers often share intellectual property. Sometimes sharing is facilitated by intermediaries such as libraries, license servers, used-book shops or video rental stores. Sometimes sharing is illicit, such as with pirated software or Napster. Sometimes sellers of intellectual property welcome sharing, as with site licenses or special prices for libraries, and sometimes they discourage it. Inte...

We study cost-sharing mechanisms for several fundamental NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. A cost-sharing mechanism is a protocol that, given bids for a service, determines which bidders to serve and what prices to charge. The mechanism incurs a subset-dependent cost that is implicitly defined by an instance of a combinatorial optimization problem. Three desirable but mutually incomp...