A group of agents have claims on a resource, but there is not enough of it to honor all of the claims. How should it be divided? A group of agents decide to undertake a public project that they can jointly afford. How much should each of them contribute? This essay is an update of Thomson...

We consider the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, and characterize the family of rules satisfying four standard invariance requirements, homogeneity, two composition properties, and consistency. It takes as point of departure the characterization of the family of two-claimant rules...

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating con icting claims: the constrained equal-awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal-losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium...

An allocation rule is consistent if the recommendation it makes for each problem “agrees” with the recommendation it makes for each associated reduced problem, obtained by imagining some agents leaving with their assignments. Some authors have described the consistency principle as a...

In this paper we consider a sequential allocation problem with n individuals. The first individual can consume any amount of some endowment leaving the remaining for the second individual, and so on. Motivated by the limitations associated with the cooperative or non-cooperative solutions we...

The concede-and-divide rule is a basic solution for bankruptcy problems with two claimants.An extension of the concede-and-divide rule to bankruptcy problems with more than two claimants is provided.This extension not only uses the concede-and-divide principle in its procedural definition, but...

In economics the main efficiency criterion is that of Pareto-optimality. For problems of distributing a social endowment a central notion of fairness is no-envy (each agent should receive a bundle at least as good, according to her own preferences, as any of the other agent's bundle). For most...

We study claims problems in which a certain amount of indivisible units (of an homogeneous good) has to be distributed among a group of agents, when this amount is not enough to fully satisfy agents' demands. We are interested in finding solutions satisfying robustness and fairness properties....

An extension of the standard rationing model is introduced. Agents are not only identi fied by their respective claims over some amount of a scarce resource, but also by some payoff thresholds. These thresholds introduce exogenous differences among agents (full or partial priority, past...

How should scholarships be distributed among the (public) higher education students? We raise this situation as a redistribution problem. Following the approach developed in Fleurbaey (1994) and Bossert (1995), redistribution should be based on the notion of solidarity and it reallocates...