Allocating costs in set covering problems

Abstract

This paper deals with the problem of allocating costs in set covering situations. In particular, we focus on set covering situations where the optimal covering is given in advance. Thus, we take into account only the facilities that have to be opened and look for rules distributing their cost. We define a cooperative game and study the core and the nucleolus. We also introduce two new rules: the equal split rule on facilities and the serial rule. We axiomatically characterize the core, the nucleolus, and the two rules. Finally, we study several monotonicity properties of the rules.