New Characterizations of a Classical Bankruptcy Rule

Abstract

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.