Highway toll allocation problem revisited: New methods and characterizations

• We revisit highway toll allocation problems from a game-theoretic perspective. • We study two new allocation rules in this context using an axiomatic approach. • We introduce a broad family of allocation rules. • We apply our results to a real highway in Spain. This paper revisits the highway toll allocation problem (Wu, van den Brink, and Estévez-Fernández in Transport Res B-Meth 180:10288, 2024). The objective is to allocate toll revenues collected along a highway among its segments so as to support their maintenance and improvement. We propose and characterize two new allocation methods, the Segment Proportional and Segment Compensated Sharing methods, and compare them with the Segment Equal Sharing method studied in the literature. We further analyze the relationship between these methods and solution concepts from cooperative game theory. Building on this analysis, we introduce a general family of toll allocation rules that encompasses the three methods, enabling a systematic study of core allocations in the associated cooperative game. Finally, we assess the performance of these methods using a real-world dataset.