Conflict of interest policies: A general approach

We define a conflict of interest policy and show that the definition is sufficiently general to include several well-known generic policies as special cases and to define policies for different environments. We show that such conflict of interest policies can be regarded as members of $P(P(X))$, for some set $X$, where $P(X)$ denotes the powerset of $X$, and that such policies can be reduced to a canonical form. The set of canonical conflict of interest policies can be modelled by a subset of $P(P(X))$, $A(P(X))$. We derive upper and lower bounds for $|A(P(X))|$ and for the maximum length of a string that would be required to describe a conflict of interest policy. We also discuss the composition of two conflict of interest policies, an ordering for conflict of interest policies, and possible simplifications in the expression of such policies.