DIAGONALITY OF COST ALLOCATION PRICES.

The problem of allocating the production cost of a finite bundle of divisible consumption goods (or services) by means of per unit costs or prices is a basic problem in economics. Recently an axiomatic approach has been proposed in which one considers a class of cost problems and studies the mappings from that class of cost problems to prices by means of the properties these prices satisfy. The authors look for a list of properties on the class of cost problems and the price mechanism that imply the 'diagonality' of the price mechanism.