Characterization of the Owen set of linear production processes

In this paper we study linear production processes. The maximal profit that can be made has to be divided among the agents in a "fair" way. G. Owen (1975, Math. Programming 9, 358-370) assigned to every linear production process a cooperative game, a "linear production game," and introduced a method to find a subset of the core of linear production games, which we call the "Owen set." In the first part of the paper we give an axiomatic characterization of the Owen set. In the second part we study the relation between the "shuffle" property (one of the axioms) and the core of the corresponding linear production game. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C71. (C) 2000 Academic Press.