How to distribute costs associated with a delayed project (Q1614135)

If a large project is behind schedule, and there is a penalty involved, how should this penalty be distributed among different contractors and subcontractors? The authors propose two solutions to this problem: one comes from a more traditional economic analysis, and the other is an implementation of the Shapley value, a known solution to \(n\)-person cooperative games with transferable utility. In the game theory, researchers usually describe reasonable properties of a solution, like symmetry and Pareto optimality, and for every new solution concept, check which of the possible properties are satisfied by this new solution. Following this spirit, the authors introduce similar properties for the cost distribution problem, and check which of these properties are satisfied by the economical solution and by the Shapley value-based solution.