Cost Sharing with Hidden Time Flexibility

2026-09-23

AI Summary

研究探讨了在客户隐藏时间灵活性情况下，如何通过成本分摊规则防止客户隐瞒真实服务时间区间，从而影响运营成本和分配。

Abstract

Customers often specify acceptable time intervals for receiving a service. When service on a date entails a fixed activation cost, overlapping intervals allow joint service and cost sharing. Customers may nevertheless conceal flexibility by reporting a smaller interval, affecting both operating cost and its allocation. We ask whether an operator can select a core allocation at every reported profile without making concealment profitable. We establish sharp population boundaries for preventing such coalitional reductions. When intervals may be narrowed from either end, a core-selecting rule preventing such reductions exists if and only if there are at most three customers. With four or more customers, impossibility holds even under Pareto contraction-proofness, which excludes deviations making every contracting customer weakly better off and at least one strictly better off. The impossibility persists when each contracting customer conceals only an arbitrarily small fraction of her feasible interval. The boundaries change when either the earliest or latest acceptable date of every customer is verifiable. With common verified dates, equal sharing is core-selecting and prevents such reductions for any population size. When verified dates may differ, the boundary rises to five: such a rule exists for up to five customers, whereas with six or more no core-selecting rule prevents the contracting customers from reducing their combined payment. Under Pareto contraction-proofness, however, core selection is possible for every population size on either one-sided domain. Finally, the relaxations needed for approximate core selection and coalitional contraction-proofness must grow with population size.

Problem

• Cost Sharing
• Time Flexibility
• Core Allocation
• Concealment

Innovation

• core selection
• time flexibility
• cost sharing
• Pareto contraction-proofness