In this paper, we provide an analysis of the water sector in France. Together with a description of the specificities of water delivery and the collection and treatment of waste waters, we highlight three crucial points to understand "the French water school"": the organization of the sector,...

The general interest would require that the use of major equipments be priced at their marginal cost, including all opportunity costs such as congestion and pollution costs. At least, prices should be lowered until full utilization of these equipments is obtained. This is a result that...

In this document, we present the notion of a cost game, defined as a cooperative game where the gain from cooperation is the cost reduction obtained when the projects of a set of agents are realized in a coordinated way. The problem is then to decide how this gain will be shared among agents or...

In this paper, we present the main solution concepts for cooperative games, which have been used in the context of cost games. We put a special emphasis on the concept of core. We also present the concepts of semicore, von Neumann-Morgenstern stable set, nucleolus and Shapley value. However, we...

Large cities have underground networks of pipes and/or wires for water, sewage, natural gas, electricity and telecommunication services. These networks carry heavy fixed costs that must be shared among users. This problem has specific characteristics that we illustrate with an example. After...

La plupart des organisations, sinon toutes, répartissent d'une manière ou d'une autre des coûts communs entre leurs diverses composantes ou encore entre leurs différents partenaires. Ces problèmes de partage de coûts communs se posent avec de plus en plus d'acuité car les règles de...

In this paper, we present the different cost sharing methods one can find in the economic literature. We regroup the methods into three sets : the proportional methods, the cooperative game theory methods and the serial cost sharing methods. All those methods are presented through the stylized...

It is important that the choice of a cost sharing method be made on the basis of its general equity and consistency properties rather than on the basis of the results it may generate in a given application. In this paper, we partition the different methods according to whether they satisfy a...

In order to choose the proper size of an infrastructure and to save as much as possible on investment costs, it is necessary for the responsible party (the Centre in the language of this report) to have access to information that is typically known only by some agents or partners who may use...