Bargaining with a Composite Player: An Application to the Uruguay Round of GATT Negotiations

The paper analyses a situation in which negotiations take place between a party consisting of a single decision-maker and a party consisting of a group of two decision-makers. The latter, in setting its proposal to the opponent party, may act cooperatively or non-cooperatively within itself. The model seems to be applicable to many cases such as wage negotiations with a group of different workers' unions, disarmament negotiations with a group of allied countries, etc. In the paper, however, the model is directly applied to the case of the Uruguay Round of GATT negotiations. In this case the authors' conjecture is that much of the difficulty currently experienced in reaching an agreement stems from the often non-cooperative nature of the preliminary agreement within the European Community required before it can arrive at a definite proposal for negotiation with other countries.