Various urban, industrial, and agricultural pollutions discharge more than river self-purification potential damages river ecosystem and increases water treatment costs. As different decision-makers and stakeholders are involved in the water quality management in river systems, a new bankruptcy form of the game theory is used to resolve the existing conflict of interests related to waste load allocation in downstream river. The river restoration potential can allocate to the conflicting parties with respect to their claims, by using bankruptcy solution methods. In this research, dischargeable pollution loads to Karun River are determined by pollution sources in various scenarios using bankruptcy methods for conflict resolution. For this purpose, the QUAL2 K river water quality simulation model is integrated with particle swarm optimization model, while various pollution loadings discharge policies have been determined based on bankruptcy method. This method was employed in one of the most pollutant rivers of southern Iran. As the salinity is one of the most important problems in the Karun River, the electrical conductivity is considered as water quality index. The results show that the proposed model for waste load allocation can reduce the salinity of the allocated water demands as well as the salinity discharged into the river. It should be noted that the suggested method does not necessarily minimize the total cost of wastewater treatment in the basin and might result in suboptimal allocations from an economic optimization method. But it should be the emphasis that this method can be used to develop practical solutions when utility information is not available or reliable, side payments are not feasible, and parties are not highly cooperative. © 2018, Islamic Azad University (IAU).