Highway games on weakly cyclic graphs

A highway problem is determined by a connected graph which provides all potential entry and exit vertices and all possible edges that can be constructed between vertices, a cost function on the edges of the graph and a set of players, each in need of constructing a connection between a specific entry and exit vertex. Mosquera (2007) introduce highway problems and the corresponding cooperative cost games called highway games to address the problem of fair allocation of the construction costs in case the underlying graph is a tree. In this paper, we study the concavity and the balancedness of highway games on weakly cyclic graphs. A graph G is called highway-game concave if for each highway problem in which G is the underlying graph the corresponding highway game is concave. We show that a graph is highway-game concave if and only if it is weakly triangular. Moreover, we prove that highway games on weakly cyclic graphs are balanced. (C) 2009 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.