This instructional case examines quantitative and qualitative information in the decision to acquire a franchise store of a Gourmet Deli chain. In particular, it illustrates to students how commonly requested quantitative information in practice, such as an income statement, needs to be tailored...

The European Commission has produced precise rules governing the computation of the cost of services of general economic interest (SGEI). The Commission has adopted a fully distributed cost approach where the SGEI can bear a "reasonable" share of the common cost. We highlight a possible...

In this paper we consider the question of allocating costs and setting prices for customers in a variety of queuing systems. We will focus on the problem of setting users fees within an organization for a shared resource, such as a computer center. We argue that both the Aumann-Shapley pricing...

Cost allocation problems arise in many contexts in economics and management science. In a typical problem that we have in mind, a decision maker must decide how to allocate the joint cost of production among several commodities using prices. Furthermore, these prices must satisfy certain...

Recent years have seen a dramatic shift from mutual funds into hedge funds even though hedge funds charge management fees that have been decried as outrageous. While expectations of superior returns may be responsible for this shift, this article shows that mutual funds are more expensive than...

In this paper, we analyze the cost allocation problem when a group of agents or nodes have to be connected to a source, and where the cost matrix describing the cost of connecting each pair of agents is not necessarily symmetric, thus extending the well-studied problem of minimum cost spanning...

We propose a new cost allocation rule for minimum cost Spanning tree games. The new rule is a core selection and also satisfices cost monotonicity. We also give charqcterization theorems for the new rule as well as the much-studied Bird allocation. We show that the principal difference between...

In U.S. antitrust, pricing below some level of cost has become almost necessary to a finding of predatory pricing. The case law is ambiguous on this, and the Circuits have differing standards, but many courts require a showing that price is, or was, below marginal (sometimes called incremental)...

Lloyd Shapley is considered one of the pioneers of game theory. His most prominent contributions are the inception and study of value theory and core theory. These two theories are the key to solving problems involving the allocation of goods or payoffs achievable through cooperation....