Abstract: Reasonability of the resettlement compensation by a hydropower project is directly related to the immigrants’ rights and interests, thereby becoming a key factor in successful implementation of the project. This paper examines reservoir resettlement and hydropower development enterprises and presents a systematical analysis on the cost and benefits of these two stakeholders. We consider the cost-benefit caused by a hydropower project in which immigrants actively participate as a cooperative benefit, and develop a resettlement compensation model by using the Shapley value in cooperative game and making a tradeoff between the risk taken, resource investment, and contribution from both sides during project construction. This model can be solved for the sum of compensation for the immigrants, and its calculations are tested through application to a large hydropower station. Calculations show that the current method of calculating reservoir resettlement compensation is not able to give a full consideration of the cooperation benefits brought about by a hydropower project and its unreasonable determination of compensation could easily cause conflicts and even incidents between the two parties. Thus we suggest that the compensation payment of reservoir resettlement should be determined from the perspective of cooperation.