Allocating the costs of cleaning a river: expected responsibility versus median responsibility

Abstract

We consider the problem of cleaning a transboundary river, proposed by Ni and Wang (2007). A river is modeled as a segment divided into subsegments, each occupied by one region, from upstream to downstream. The waste is transferred from one region to the next at some rate. Since this transfer rate may be unknown, the social planner could have uncertainty over each region's responsibility. Two natural candidates to distribute the costs in this setting would be the method that assigns to each region its expected responsibility and the one that assigns to each region its median responsibility. We show that the latter is equivalent to the Upstream Responsibility method (Alcalde-Unzu et al., 2015) and the former is a new method that we call Expected Responsibility. We compare both solutions and analyze them in terms of a new property of monotonicity.

A Linear Model for Freight Transportation

“…For instance, (Liu et al, 2020) minimize fuel consumption in balanced networks, and Ma et al (2018) study urban road networks. Other studies are based on the transportation of freight on rivers (Alcalde-Unzu et al, 2021;van den Brink et al, 2018;Sun et al, 2019).…”