---
title: What is Eligibility rules?
url: https://markin.ai/glossary/eligibility-rules
category: Decisioning and next best action
---

# 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. They are hard filters applied before any scoring, never trade-offs a model can outweigh.

## Why it matters for ARPU

Enterprise decisioning is only deployable when the boundaries are explicit and auditable. Eligibility is where compliance is enforced, so it must sit outside the optimiser.

## Related terms

- [Arbitration](https://markin.ai/glossary/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.
- [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.
- [Guardrail metric](https://markin.ai/glossary/guardrail-metric), A guardrail metric is a measure an experiment must not damage even if the primary metric improves: unsubscribe rate, complaint volume, margin, support contacts, app uninstalls.

## Go deeper

- [Customer decisioning](https://markin.ai/solutions/customer-decisioning), Rules, scoring and arbitration in order.
- [Security and trust](https://markin.ai/security), How constraints are enforced.

Source: https://markin.ai/glossary/eligibility-rules