General aggregation of demand and cost sharing methods

This paper extends the notion of cost sharing to models with general demand aggregation rules. In the process, aggregated serial cost sharing mechanisms are defined and characterized. A framework for a dynamic view on cost sharing is provided, introducing the notion of consistency to the generalized cost sharing model. Corresponding optimistic and pessimistic cooperative cost games are defined and their cores are studied. In particular, we show that the class of bankruptcy problems can be seen as a special class of cost sharing problems. It is seen that the serial mechanism in this specific case is closely related to the Constrained Equal Award rule.