Lorenz rankings of rules for the adjudication of conflicting claims

For the adjudication of conflicting claims, we develop three general approaches to obtain Lorenz rankings of rules. Our first approach concerns a parameterized family that contains several important rules (Thomson in Soc Choice Welf 31:667–692, 2008 ). We give a condition that the parameters defining two members of the family should satisfy for one of them to Lorenz dominate the other. Our second approach exploits the concept of “consistency” (Young in Math Oper Res 12:398–414, 1987 ). We derive a criterion to deduce Lorenz domination for arbitrarily many claimants from Lorenz domination in the two-claimant case. Our third approach is based on the notion of an “operator” on the space of rules (Thomson and Yeh in J Econ Theory 143:177–198, 2008 ). We develop conditions under which operators preserve the Lorenz order, or reverse it. As corollaries of our general theorems, we obtain rankings of most of the rules that have been discussed in the literature. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2012