Sharing the costs of cleaning a river: the Upstream Responsibility rule

Jorge Alcalde-Unzu (), María Gómez-Rúa and Elena Molis

Documentos de Trabajo - Lan Gaiak Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra from Departamento de Economía - Universidad Pública de Navarra

Abstract: The cleaning up of waste present in transboundary rivers, which requires the cooperation of diferent authorities, is a problematic issue, especially when responsibility for the discharge of the waste is not well-defined. Following Ni and Wang [12] we assume that a river is a segment divided into several regions from upstream to downstream. We show that when the transfer rate of the waste is unknown, the clean-up cost vector provides useful information for estimating some limits in regard to the responsibility of each region. We propose a cost allocation rule, the Upstream Responsibility rule, which takes into account these limits in distributing costs "fairly" and we provide an axiomatic characterization of this rule via certain properties based on basic ideas concerning the responsibility of regions.

Keywords: Cost allocation; waste river; responsibility; characterizations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C71 D61 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Sharing the costs of cleaning a river: the Upstream Responsibility rule (2015)
Working Paper: Sharing the costs of cleaning a river: the Upstream Responsibility rule (2013)
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