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...

this study was carried out in zarabd, bardsir and sirjan in kerman province in 2002-2003. a number of 58 green-house owners, five wholesaller and 20 retalisaller selected by systemathic sampling method. the results showed that cost marketing service was from 196 to 620 rials and marketing net benefit was 375 rials for cucumber and 230 rials for tomato. retail marketing net benefit was 204 rials...

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...

In cloud computing, cloud providers can offer cloud consumers two provisioning plans for computing resources, formal reservation and on-demand plans. Usually, cost of utilizing computing resources provisioned by reservation plan is cheaper than that provisioned by ondemand plan, since cloud consumer has to pay to provider in advance. With the reservation plan(Local Adjustment), the consumer can...

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...