In this paper we analyze the (im)possibility of the exact distinguishability of orthogonal multipartite entangled states under restricted local operation and classical communication. Based on this local distinguishability analysis we propose a new scheme for quantum secret sharing (QSS). Our QSS scheme is quite general and cost efficient compared to other schemes. In our scheme no joint quantum...

BACKGROUND To address the impact that out-of-pocket prices may have on medication use, it is vital to understand how the demand for medications may be affected when patients are faced with changes in the price to acquire treatment and how price responsiveness differs across medication classes.  OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of cost-sharing changes on the demand for 8 classes of prescription...

Economic guidance can be of substantial value to policymakers in principle. However, guidance delivered in the form of complex formulae and detailed mathematical characterizations of optimal policies may not be fully appreciated or warmly embraced. Consequently, insights like those of William Rogerson (2003) are particularly important. Rogerson demonstrates in a plausible setting that a pair of...

We study the cost sharing problem for cooperative games in situations where the cost function C is not available via oracle queries, but must instead be learned from samples drawn from a distribution, represented as tuples (S,C(S)), for different subsets S of players. We formalize this approach, which we call STATISTICAL COST SHARING, and consider the computation of the core and the Shapley val...

A new serial cost sharing rule, called mixed serial cost sharing, is defined on the class of cost functions which equal a sum of an increasing convex and increasing concave function. This rule is based on a particular decomposition principle known as complementary-slackness decomposition and it coincides with the original serial rule of Moulin and Shenker (1992) [Moulin, H., Shenker, S., 1992. ...

A new concept of consistency for cost sharing solutions is discussed, analyzed, and related to the homonymous property within the rationing context. The class of additive and consistent mechanisms is isomorphic to the class of consistent and monotonic rationing methods. Consequently average and serial cost sharing are consistent, whereas Shapley-Shubik is not. Average cost sharing is the only s...

We consider cost-sharing mechanisms for the Steiner tree game. In this well-studied cooperative game, each selfish user expresses his/her willingness to pay for being connected to a source node s in an underlying graph. A mechanism decides which users will be connected and divides the cost of the corresponding (optimal) Steiner tree among these users (budget balance condition). Since users can ...

We describe the construction and analysis of asymmetric Cost Sharing mechanisms, in which a variety of axioms are applied to subsets of the agents/goods. We show that the analysis can be quite subtle as apparently similar axiomatizations lead to significantly different results; in particular, combinations of symmetric mechanisms can be extremely asymmetric and biased. In addition, we characteri...