How to Share Railways Infrastructure Costs?

Abstract

In this paper we propose an infrastructure access tariff in a cost allocation problem arising from the reorganization of the railway sector in Europe. To that aim we introduce the class of infrastructure cost games. A game in this class is a sum of airport games and what we call maintenance cost games, and models the infrastructure costs (building and maintenance) produced when a set of different types of trains belonging to several agents makes use of a certain infrastructure. We study some properties of infrastructure cost games and provide a formula for the Shapley value of a game in this class. The access tariff we propose is based on the Shapley value of infrastructure cost games.