Traveling salesman games

In this paper we discuss the problem of how to divide the total cost of a round trip along several institutes among the institutes visited. We introduce two types of cooperative games—fixed-route traveling salesman games and traveling salesman games—as a tool to attack this problem. Under very mild conditions we prove that fixed-route traveling salesman games have non-empty cores if the fixed route is a solution of the classical traveling salesman problem. Core elements provide us with fair cost allocations. A traveling salesman game may have an empty core, even if the cost matrix satisfies the triangle inequality. In this paper we introduce a class of matrices defining TS-games with non-empty cores.