Rationing a commodity along fixed paths

A commodity is divided among agents with single-peaked preferences. The commodity is either infinitely divisible or comes in indivisible units. A rationing method elicits individual peaks (demands); if the commodity is overdemanded (resp. underdemanded), no agent receives more (resp. less) than his peak. A fixed-path rationing method allocates an overdemanded "good" along a path independent of individual demands, except that an agent receives exactly his demand if it is below the path-generated share. An underdemanded "bad" is allocated similarly along another path. The four properties efficiency, strategyproofness, resource monotonicity, and consistency characterize the set of fixed path rationing methods. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D63, D70. (C) 1999 Academic Press.