The Talmud Rule and the Securement of Agents' Awards

This paper provides a characterization of the classical Talmud rule for bankruptcy problems by means of a new property, called securement, that imposes a lower bound on the awards that agents obtain. This property stipulates that no agent holding a feasible claim will get less than one nth of her claim, and also that every agent holding an unfeasible claim will get at least one nth of the amount to divide, where n is the number of agents involved in the problem. We show that securement together with the standard properties of consistency and self-duality characterizes the Talmud rule