Juan D. Moreno-Ternero

The Talmud rule and the securement of agents' awards

This paper provides a new characterization of the Talmud rule by means of a new property, called securement. This property says that any agent holding a feasible claim will get at least one nht of her claim, where n is the number of agents involved. We show that securement together with a weak version of path independence and the standard properties of self-duality and consistency characterize the Talmud rule.

The TAL-Family of Rules for Bankruptcy Problems

AbstractThis paper analyzes a family of rules for bankruptcy problems that generalizes the Talmud rule (T) and encompasses both the constrained equal-awards rule (A) and the constrained equal-losses rule (L). The family is defined by means of a parameter

A common ground for resource and welfare egalitarianism

\theta \in [0,1]

Stability and fairness in models with a multiple membership

that can be interpreted as a measure of the distributive power of the rule. We provide a systematic study of the structural properties of the rules within the family and its connections with the existing literature.

The Veil of Ignorance Violates Priority

This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating conflicting 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 allocation coincides with the recommendation of one of these three rules. In addition, we let subjects play an additional game that has the property that all (and only) strategy profiles in which players coordinate on the same rule constitute a strict Nash equilibrium. While in the first three games subjects’ play easily converges to the unique equilibrium rule, in the last game the proportional rule overwhelmingly prevails as a coordination device, especially when we frame the game as an hypothetical bankruptcy situation. We also administered a questionnaire to a different group of students, asking them to act as impartial arbitrators to solve (among others) the same problems played in the lab. Also in this case, respondents were sensitive to the framing of the questions, but the proportional rule was selected by the vast majority of respondents.

Fair Allocation of Disputed Properties

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agentsʼ abilities (to transform the resource into an interpersonally comparable outcome) and starting points may differ. Both conceptions of egalitarianism are naturally modeled in this context as two allocation rules. The two rules are jointly characterized by the combination of three appealing axioms: no-domination, solidarity, and composition.

On the equivalence between progressive taxation and inequality reduction

We analyze a general model of rationing in which agents have baselines, in addition to claims against the (insufficient) endowment of the good to be allocated. Many real-life problems fit this general model (e.g., bankruptcy with prioritized claims, resource allocation in the public health care sector, water distribution in drought periods). We introduce (and characterize) a natural class of allocation methods for this model. Any method within the class is associated with a rule in the standard rationing model, and we show that if the latter obeys some focal properties, the former obeys them too.

Progressive and merging-proof taxation

This article studies a model of coalition formation for the joint production (and finance) of public projects, in which agents may belong to multiple coalitions. We show that, if projects are divisible, there always exists a stable (secession-proof) structure, i.e., a structure in which no coalition would reject a proposed arrangement. When projects are indivisible, stable allocations may fail to exist and, for those cases, we resort to the least core in order to estimate the degree of instability. We also examine the compatibility of stability and fairness in metric environments with indivisible projects, where we also explore the performance of well-known solutions, such as the Shapley value and the nucleolus.