New characterizations of a classical bankruptcy rule

Concede-and-divide is a well-known and widely accepted procedure to solve bankruptcy situations involving two agents. In a recent paper, Moreno-Ternero and Villar (2004) characterize it by means of a new property, called securement, that imposes a lower bound on the awards agents might obtain. This property can be naturally decomposed in two more elementary ones. We show that each of these components, together with a suitable version of monotonicity and the standard property of self-duality, also characterize concede-and-divide. We also show that one of these components characterizes the rule, when combined with the standard property of minimal rights first.     

Composition, Securement, and Concede-and-divide

Concede-and-divide is a widely accepted procedure to solve the problem of adjudicating two conflicting claims. In this paper we show that this procedure can be characterized by combining three standard properties in the literature: self-duality, lower securement, and restricted composition up. We also show that self-duality can be replaced by the dual properties of lower securement and restricted composition up and that both characterization results are tight.