Independence of downstream and upstream benefits in river water allocation problems

Rene van den Brink (), Arantza Estévez-Fernández (), Gerard Laan () and Nigel Moes
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Arantza Estévez Fernández

Social Choice and Welfare, 2014, vol. 43, issue 1, 173-194

Abstract: We consider the problem of sharing water among agents located along a river, who have quasi-linear preferences over water and money. The benefit of consuming an amount of water is given by a continuous, concave benefit function. In this setting, a solution efficiently distributes water over the agents and wastes no money. Since we deal with concave benefit functions, it is not always possible to follow the usual approach and define a cooperative river game. Instead, we directly introduce axioms for solutions on the water allocation problem. Besides three basic axioms, we introduce two independence axioms to characterize the downstream incremental solution, introduced by Ambec and Sprumont (J Econ Theory 107:453–462, 2002 ), and a new solution, called the UTI incremental solution. Both solutions can be implemented by allocating the water optimally among the agents and monetary transfers between the agents. We also consider the particular case in which every agent has a satiation point, constant marginal benefit equal to one up to its satiation point and marginal benefit of zero thereafter. This boils down to a water claim problem, where each agent only has a nonnegative claim on water, but no benefit function is specified. In this case, both solutions can be implemented without monetary transfers. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014

Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00355-013-0771-x (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:sochwe:v:43:y:2014:i:1:p:173-194

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... c+theory/journal/355

DOI: 10.1007/s00355-013-0771-x

Access Statistics for this article

Social Choice and Welfare is currently edited by Bhaskar Dutta, Marc Fleurbaey, Elizabeth Maggie Penn and Clemens Puppe

More articles in Social Choice and Welfare from Springer, The Society for Social Choice and Welfare Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().