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 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...

Background Research predicting the public health and fiscal impact of Supervised Injection Facilities (SIFs), across different cities in Canada, has reported positive results on the reduction of HIV cases among People Who Inject Drugs (PWID). Most of the existing studies have focused on the outcomes of Insite, located in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside (DTES). Previous attention has not been af...

In recent years, car-sharing systems have been announced as a way to increase mobility and to decrease the number of single-occupant vehicles, congestion, and air pollution in many parts of the world. This study presents a linear programming model to optimize one-way car-sharing systems for electric cars considering the depreciation costs of chargers and vehicles as well as relocation cost of v...