A new construction for cancellative families of sets (Q1918871)

Summary: We say a family, \(H\), of subsets of an \(n\)-element set is cancellative if \(A\cup B= A\cup C\) implies \(B= C\) when \(A, B, C\in H\). We show how to construct cancellative families of sets with \(c2^{.54797n}\) elements. This improves the previous best bound \(c2^{.52832n}\) and falsifies conjectures of Erdös and Katona and of Bollobás.