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...

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...

We study cost-sharing mechanisms for several fundamental NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems. A cost-sharing mechanism is a protocol that, given bids for a service, determines which bidders to serve and what prices to charge. The mechanism incurs a subset-dependent cost that is implicitly defined by an instance of a combinatorial optimization problem. Three desirable but mutually incomp...

The equitable division of a joint cost (or a jointly produced output) among agents with different shares or types of output (or input) commodities, is a central theme of the theory of cooperative games with transferable utility. Ever since Shapley’s seminal contribution in 1953, this question has generated some of the deepest axiomatic results of modern microeconomic theory. More recently, the ...

We study the best guarantees of efficiency approximation achievable by cost-sharing mechanisms. Our main result is the first quantitative lower bound that applies to all truthful cost-sharing mechanisms, including randomized mechanisms that are only truthful in expectation, and only β-budget-balanced in expectation. Our lower bound is optimal up to constant factors and applies even to the simpl...