The Determination of Marginal-Cost Prices Under a Set of Axioms

THE MAIN PURPOSE of this paper is to provide an axiomatic approach to marginal cost (MC) pricing and to point out its similarity with Aumann-Shapley (A-S) pricing. The latter is a cost-sharing price mechanism discussed in [3 and 6] that is derived from a set of five natural axioms. In this paper we consider models in which there is one producer with a given technology who faces fixed input prices and produces a finite number of consumption goods. Thus, we can uniquely derive the cost function that describes the minimal cost of producing a given vector of consumption goods. By a price mechanism P(., ) we mean a rule or a function that associates with each cost function F and vector a of quantities, a vector of prices: