Teresa Estañ, Natividad Llorca, Joaquín Sánchez (Operations Research Center, University Miguel Hernández of Elche) and Ricardo Martínez (Departmento de Teoría e Historia Económica, Universidad de Granada)
Abstract: In this paper we study the class of claims problems where the amount to be divided is perfectly divisible and claims are made on indivisible units of several items. Each item has a price, and the available amount falls short to be able to cover all the claims at the given prices. We propose several properties that may be of interest in this particular framework. These properties represent the common principles of fairness, efficiency, and non-manipulability by merging or splitting. Efficiency is our focal principle, which is formalized by means of two axioms: non-wastefulness and Pareto efficiency. We show that some combinations of the properties we consider are compatible, others are not.