We seek to extend our understanding of bargaining preferences, and do so experimentally using the three-player demand bargaining game. In this game, two non-proposers simultaneously state their demands, then the proposer offers, and at least one demand must be satisfied otherwise the proposal...

People's desire for fair transactions can play an important role in negotiations, organizations, and markets. In this paper, we show that markets can also shape what people consider to be a fair transaction. We propose a simple and generally-applicable model of path-dependent fairness...

Pre-play face-to-face communication is known to facilitate cooperation. Various explanations exist for this effect, varying in their dependence on the strategic content of the communication. Previous studies have found similar communication effects regardless of whether strategic communication...

Social Choice traditionally employs the preferences of voters or agents as primitives. However, in most situations of constitutional decision-making the beliefs of the members of the electorate determine their secondary preferences or choices. Key choices in US political history, such as the...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

One feature of legislative bargaining in naturally occurring settings is that the distribution of seats or voting weights often does not accurately reflect bargaining power. Game-theoretic predictions about payoffs and coalition formation are insensitive to nominal differences in vote...

We use a new experimental design to test Schelling's hypotheses about the nature and effectiveness of focal points in tacit bargaining problems. In our design, as in many real-world bargaining problems, each player's strategies are framed as proposals about what part of a stock of valuable...

The evolution of cooperation has been the focus of intense research in the social sciences, natural sciences (especially biology), and even computer science. It has long been recognized that the possibility of future consequences is crucial to the emergence of rational cooperation. It was...

In his classic article “An Essay on Bargaining” Schelling (1956) argues that ignorance might actually be strength rather than weakness. We test and confirm Schelling's conjecture in a simple take-it-or-leave-it bargaining experiment where the proposer can choose between two possible offers....

We experimentally investigate how proposers in the Ultimatum Game behave when their cognitive resources are constrained by time pressure and cognitive load. In a dual-system perspective, when proposers are cognitively constrained and thus their deliberative capacity is reduced, their offers are...