Allocating water resources in transboundary river basins: A sequential rubinstein bargaining approach with risk discounting

Study region The Mekong River Basin Study focus This study reduces the multi-agent bargaining game to a one-to-one model by assuming downstream countries act as coalitions in water allocation scenarios. Each country’s risk level and perception inform its discount factor, which is then aggregated and converted into coalition discount factors through weighted averaging. Then, a Rubinstein bargaining water allocation model with multi-agent participation and multi-stage negotiation is constructed and applied to allocate water in the Mekong River Basin. New hydrological insights for the region The proposed Multi-stage Rubinstein Bargaining Model produced allocations that were more stable than those generated by traditional bankruptcy rules such as Proportion, Adjusted Proportion, Constrained Equal Loss, Constrained Equal Award, and Shapley. Therefore, this allocation framework can serve as both a theoretical foundation and a practical tool for water allocation in transboundary river basins.