Rawlsian pricing of access to public facilities: A unidimensional illustration

We consider a setting where citizens using a public facility (e.g., a hospital, a library or a post-office) face an idiosyncratic private access cost (e.g. transportation) and, in addition, must contribute to the costs of facility. We show that if the population is uniformly spread over the entire real line, if the cost of a facility is independent of location and access costs are linear with respect to distance, then the Rawlsian access pricing (i) equates the total cost borne by every citizen; and (ii) is the unique cost sharing solution that satisfies the “core property” of secession-proofness that amounts to the voluntary participation principle under which no group of citizens should be charged more than the cost incurred if it had acted on its own.