Cooperative Production and Efficiency

• Authors: Carmen Beviá and Luis C. Corchón
• BSE Working Paper: 305 | March 2026

We characterize the sharing rule for which a contribution mechanism achieves efficiency in a cooperative production setting when agents are heterogeneous. The sharing rule bears no resemblance to those considered by the previous literature. We also show for a large class of sharing rules that if Nash equilibrium yields efficient allocations, the production function displays constant returns to scale, a case in which cooperation in production is useless.