A Museum Cost Sharing Problem

Abstract

Ginsburgh and Zang [2] consider a revenue sharing problem for the museum pass program, in which several museums jointly offer museum passes that allow visitors an unlimited access to participating museums in a certain period of time. We consider a cost sharing problem that can be regarded as the dual problem of the above revenue sharing problem. We assume that all museums are public goods and have various (e.g., ser-vice) costs. These costs must be shared by museum visitors. We propose a cost sharing method and provide an axiomatic characterization of the method. We then define a game for the problem and show that the cost sharing method is the Shapley value of the game. We also provide a comparative statics analysis for both the Shapley value of the museum pass game and the Shapley value for the cost sharing game when the number of museums and/or the number of visitors change.