Two families of rules for the adjudication of conflicting claims

We define two families of rules to adjudicate conflicting claims. The first family contains the constrained equal awards, constrained equal losses, Talmud, and minimal overlap rules. The second family, which also contains the constrained equal awards and constrained equal losses rules, is obtained from the first one by exchanging, for each problem, how well agents with relatively larger claims are treated as compared to agents with relatively smaller claims. In each case, we identify the subfamily of consistent rules. JEL classification number: C79; D63; D74 Key-words: claims problems; constrained equal awards rule; constrained equal losses rule; Talmud rule; minimal overlap rule; ICI rules; CIC rules; consistency. ∗I gratefully acknowledge support from NSF under grant SES-0214691. I also thank Tarık Kara, Cori Vilella, and in particular Juan Moreno-Ternero, Rodrigo Velez, and a referee, for their comments. This paper grew out of a section of the Condorcet Lecture I delivered at the VI-th International Meeting of the Social Choice and Welfare Society, Alicante, July 2000. filename: ICICIC.tex