---
title: What is Arbitration?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/arbitration
category: Decisioning and next best action
---

# Arbitration

> Arbitration is the step that resolves competing candidate actions for the same customer into one decision, ranking them by expected value under constraints such as contact limits, budget, fairness and business priority. Doing nothing always competes as a valid option.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Without arbitration, every team's best action reaches the customer at once and the aggregate effect on ARPU is negative even when each action is individually sensible.

## Related terms

- [Candidate action](https://markin.ai/glossary/candidate-action), A candidate action is one specific intervention eligible for one specific customer at one moment: an offer, a message, a price, a plan change, a support intervention or deliberately doing nothing.
- [Contact policy](https://markin.ai/glossary/contact-policy), Contact policy governs how often, through which channels and with what spacing a customer may be contacted.
- [Next best action](https://markin.ai/glossary/next-best-action), Next best action is the single intervention that maximises expected value for a specific customer at a specific moment, chosen across every available option including doing nothing.
- [Eligibility rules](https://markin.ai/glossary/eligibility-rules), Eligibility rules define which actions a customer may legally, commercially and contractually receive: consent status, market availability, existing plan, discount history, regulatory constraints.

## Go deeper

- [Next best action marketing](https://markin.ai/blog/what-is-next-best-action), The pillar guide to per-customer, per-moment decisioning.
- [Personalization vs revenue decisioning](https://markin.ai/compare/personalization-vs-revenue-decisioning), Why one winner matters.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/arbitration