Most, if not all, organizations allocate common costs in one way or another among their various components or among their various partners. These common cost sharing problems are becoming increasingly acute as common cost sharing rules are important factors in competitiveness and performance. Although their explicit scientific analysis is already relatively advanced, their application within organizations (companies, alliances or business networks, governments) remains relatively embryonic and often dependent on an ad hoc historical approach, rather than rationally chosen to maximize organizational performance and value.
We believe that organizations, broadly defined, would benefit from investing resources in learning common cost sharing methods that are more rigorous, efficient, equitable and incentive-based than those commonly used. We stress the importance of this investment in an economic context where the development of common infrastructures, both private and public, is omnipresent and conditions efficiency gains, which themselves have become the real cornerstone of competitiveness.
We briefly present some cost sharing methods (Shapley-Shubik, nucleoli, sequential rule, ECPR, Ramsey-Boiteux, GPC). The study of these methods, which could better enhance the value of common infrastructures, is pursued in greater depth in the other documents in this series. Finally, we show how these methods have been or could be applied to nine problems that represent a much broader set of possible applications.