Sharing costs in Swedish road ownership associations

Sofia Grahn-Voorneveld
2012 Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice  
Usually transport systems, and roads in particular, are viewed as public goods. However, this is not always the case. In Sweden a large part of the road system is privately owned. Most of these privately owned roads are rural roads used by farmers and summer cottage owners, or used for forest transport. The roads are mainly provided by ownership associations. The motivation of this paper is the practical problem of how such an ownership association can divide the costs for the road network
more » ... the members in a "fair" way. The problem is treated from a game theoretical point of view, making use of the Shapley value. This means that the problem is associated with a game -a mathematical representation of the conflict situation. The Shapley value is a very important solution concept for cooperative games, like the game in this case. For games corresponding to this specific type of problems, it is shown that the Shapley value has excellent properties, such as being an element of the core, and being very easy to compute. Abstract Usually transport systems, and roads in particular, are viewed as public goods. However, this is not always the case. In Sweden a large part of the road system is privately owned. Most of these privately owned roads are rural roads used by farmers and summer cottage owners, or used for forest transport. The roads are mainly provided by ownership associations. The motivation of this paper is the practical problem of how such an ownership association can divide the costs for the road network among the members in a "fair" way. The problem is treated from a game theoretical point of view, making use of the Shapley value. This means that the problem is associated with a game -a mathematical representation of the con ict situation. The Shapley value is a very important solution concept for cooperative games, like the game in this case. For games corresponding to this speci c type of problems, it is shown that the Shapley value has excellent properties, such as being an element of the core, and being very easy to compute. I thank Jan-Eric Nilsson for useful comments.
doi:10.1016/j.tra.2011.11.014 fatcat:aikmroilifb2pftg3guokewose