A recurring puzzle in bargaining experiments is that individuals under–respond to changes in their bargaining position, compared to the predictions of standard bargaining theories. Nearly all of these results have come from settings with bargaining power allocated exogenously, so that...

We use a human–subjects experiment to investigate how bargaining outcomes are affected by changes in the bargainers’ disagreement payoffs. Subjects play one of two bargaining games – a standard simultaneous–move Nash demand game, or a related unstructured bargaining game – against...