Chapter 4 Public facility location: A multiregional and multi-authority decision context

This chapter describes some public facility location (PFL) problems. PFL problems have been studied within several analytical traditionsfor example, the general location theory, the theories of public goods and public choice, and the operations research tradition. The chapter focuses on the study of PFL-problems that are related to different aspects of these traditions. The perspective in this study is not intra-urban but regional. This is emphasized by a concentration on location problems in the agendas of the following type: (i) location among municipalities in a region and (ii) location among regions in a national (or multiregional) perspective. Taking a region as a reference area, the chapter identifies the coordination problem of a regional authority and the simultaneous game-like competition among each municipality of the region. Municipality refers to a community with a local government. A similar two-level decision problem is also identified for settings with a national authority and independent regional authorities. The chapter presents various types of PFL-problems and deals with the aggregation of demand and supply from the subregional to the regional level.