Characterizing the Shapley value in fixed-route traveling salesman problems with appointments

Starting from her home, a service provider visits several customers, following a predetermined route, and returns home after all customers are visited. The problem is to …nd a fair allocation of the total cost of this tour among the customers served. A transferableutility cooperative game can be associated with this cost allocation problem. We introduce a new class of games, which we refer as the …xed-route traveling salesman games with appointments. We characterize the Shapley Value in this class using a property which requires that sponsors do not bene…t from mergers, or splitting into a set of sponsors. JEL Classi…cation Codes : C71 Keywords : …xed-route traveling salesman games, routing games, appointment games, the Shapley value, the core, transferable-utility games, merging and splitting proofness, networks, cost allocation.