Proportional rule (bankruptcy)

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The proportional rule is a division rule for solving bankruptcy problems. According to this rule, each claimant should receive an amount proportional to their claim. In the context of taxation, it corresponds to a proportional tax. [1]

Contents

Formal definition

There is a certain amount of money to divide, denoted by (=Estate or Endowment). There are nclaimants. Each claimant i has a claim denoted by . Usually, , that is, the estate is insufficient to satisfy all the claims.

The proportional rule says that each claimant i should receive , where r is a constant chosen such that . In other words, each agent gets .

Examples

Examples with two claimants:

Examples with three claimants:

Characterizations

The proportional rule has several characterizations. It is the only rule satisfying the following sets of axioms:

Truncated proportional rule

There is a variant called truncated-claims proportional rule, in which each claim larger than E is truncated to E, and then the proportional rule is activated. That is, it equals , where . The results are the same for the two-claimant problems above, but for the three-claimant problems we get:

Adjusted-proportional rule

The adjusted proportional rule [8] first gives, to each agent i, their minimal right, which is the amount not claimed by the other agents. Formally, . Note that implies .

Then, it revises the claim of agent i to , and the estate to . Note that that .

Finally, it activates the truncated-claims proportional rule, that is, it returns , where .

With two claimants, the revised claims are always equal, so the remainder is divided equally. Examples:

With three or more claimants, the revised claims may be different. In all the above three-claimant examples, the minimal rights are and thus the outcome is equal to TPROP, for example, .

Characterization

Curiel, Maschler and Tijs [8] prove that the AP-rule returns the tau-value of the coalitional game associated with the bankruptcy problem.

The AP-rule is self-dual. In addition, it is the only rule satisfying the following properties:

In contrast, the truncated-proportional rule violates minimal-rights, and the proportional rule violates also Independence-of-irrelevant-claims. [8]

See also

References

  1. William, Thomson (2003-07-01). "Axiomatic and game-theoretic analysis of bankruptcy and taxation problems: a survey" . Mathematical Social Sciences. 45 (3): 249–297. doi:10.1016/S0165-4896(02)00070-7. ISSN   0165-4896.
  2. Young, H. P (1988-04-01). "Distributive justice in taxation" . Journal of Economic Theory. 44 (2): 321–335. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(88)90007-5. ISSN   0022-0531.
  3. Moulin, Hervé (1985). "Egalitarianism and Utilitarianism in Quasi-Linear Bargaining" . Econometrica. 53 (1): 49–67. doi:10.2307/1911723. ISSN   0012-9682. JSTOR   1911723.
  4. Moulin, Hervé (1985-06-01). "The separability axiom and equal-sharing methods" . Journal of Economic Theory. 36 (1): 120–148. doi:10.1016/0022-0531(85)90082-1. ISSN   0022-0531.
  5. 1 2 3 Chun, Youngsub (1988-06-01). "The proportional solution for rights problems" . Mathematical Social Sciences. 15 (3): 231–246. doi:10.1016/0165-4896(88)90009-1. ISSN   0165-4896.
  6. O'Neill, Barry (1982-06-01). "A problem of rights arbitration from the Talmud" . Mathematical Social Sciences. 2 (4): 345–371. doi:10.1016/0165-4896(82)90029-4. hdl: 10419/220805 . ISSN   0165-4896.
  7. de Frutos, M. Angeles (1999-09-01). "Coalitional manipulations in a bankruptcy problem". Review of Economic Design. 4 (3): 255–272. doi:10.1007/s100580050037. hdl: 10016/4282 . ISSN   1434-4750. S2CID   195240195.
  8. 1 2 3 Curiel, I. J.; Maschler, M.; Tijs, S. H. (1987-09-01). "Bankruptcy games" . Zeitschrift für Operations Research. 31 (5): A143 –A159. doi:10.1007/BF02109593. ISSN   1432-5217. S2CID   206811949.