A new solution to the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims (Q2494027)

In this paper for the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, the authors consider the requirement that each agent should receive at least \(1/n\) his claim truncated at the amount to divide, where \(n\) is the number of claimants (Moreno-Ternero and Villar, 2004). They identify two families of rules satisfying this bound. And then they formulate the requirement that for each problem, the awards vector should be obtainable in two equivalent ways, (i) directly or (ii) in two steps, first assigning to each claimant his lower bound and then applying the rule to the appropriately revised problem. It is shown that there is only one rule satisfying this requirement. This is the ``recursive rule'', as it is obtained be a recursion. Finally they undertake a systematic investigation of the properties of the rule.