Journal of the Mathematics Council of the Alberta Teachers’ Association
Volume 38 Issue 2, May 2001
22 – 26
Cost Allocation: An Application of Fair Division
Albert Goetz
Although the subject of cost allocation has been extensively discussed in the literature of political economics, it has been generally neglected in mathematical literature. However, cost allocation affords a practical extension of fair-division techniques–one that is readily accessible to secondary school students and that gives them a simple yet powerful application of mathematics to real-world problem solving. A study of the concepts and the mathematics involved in cost allocation is most appropriate in a discrete mathematics course or a modeling course, but a case can be made for including this topic in other courses, as well. This article presents a typical cost-allocation problem with possible solutions and includes suggestions for presenting similar problems in the classroom. The basics of the problem follow closely from Young (1994).
