For the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, we 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, 2004a). We identify two families of rules satisfying this bound....

It is shown that for a `complex economy', characterised in terms of a formal dynamical system capable of computation universality, it is impossible to devise an effective theory of policy.

We study the behavior of rules for the adjudication of con°icting claims when there are a large number of claimants with small claims. We model such situations by replicating some basic problem. We show that under replication, the random arrival rule (O'Neill, 1982) behaves like the...

For the problem of adjudicating conflicting claims, we offer simple criteria to compare rules on the basis of the Lorenz order. These criteria pertain to three families of rules. The first family contains the constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, Talmud, and minimal overlap rules...

Mediation is a dispute resolution process whereby agents reach a mutually acceptable agreement among different proposals that satisfy a set of principles. This paper provides a natural way of coming to such agreements in claims problems. In our approach, mediation combines (i) a set of fair...

We study claims problems with indivisible goods. Due to indivisibilities, in certain situations, two agents with equal claims may have to receive unequal amounts. Our main goal is to find rules that deal with these situations in a consistent way. We propose three “systematic favorability”...