On Cancellative Set Families

A family of subsets of an n-set is 2-cancellative if for every four-tuple {A, B, C, D} of its members A ∪B ∪C = A ∪B ∪D implies C = D. This generalizes the concept of cancellative set families, defined by the property that A ∪B 6= A ∪C for A, B, C all different. The asymptotics of the maximum size of cancellative families of subsets of an n-set is known, (Tolhuizen [7]). We provide a new upper bound on the size of 2-cancellative families improving the previous bound of 20.458n to 20.42n.