We offer a tractable model of tough negotiations and delayed agreement. The setting is an infinite horizon bilateral bargaining game in which negotiators can make strategic commitments to durable offers. Commitments decay stochastically, but uncommitted negotiators can make new commitments. The...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire or whom to give a contract are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resource and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is...

We argue that anti-corruption laws may provide an efficiency rationale for why political parties should meddle in the distribution of political nominations and government contracts. Anticorruption laws forbid trade in spoils that politicians distribute. However, citizens may pay for gaining...

Building on previous work by Schelling and Crawford, we study a model of bilateral bargaining in which negotiators can make binding commitments at a low positive cost c. Most of our results concern outcomes that survive iterated strict dominance. If commitment attempts never fail, there are...

Experiments suggest that communication increases the contribution to public goods (Ledyard, 1995). There is also evidence that, when contemplating a lie, people trade off their private benefit from the lie with the harm it inflicts on others (Gneezy, 2005). We develop a model of bilateral...

Most research in economics models agents somehow motivated by outcomes. Here, we model agents motivated by procedures instead, where procedures are defined independently of an outcome. To that end, we design procedures which yield the same expected outcomes or carry the same information on...

Government or company decisions on whom to hire are mostly delegated to politicians, public sector officials or human resources and procurement managers. Due to anti-corruption laws, agents cannot sell contracts or positions that they are delegated to decide upon. Even if bribing is ruled out,...

The paper studies theoretically how the optimal contract in the hidden-action moral-hazard model is affected when an agent feels bad when not reaching a target effort set in the contract. In equilibrium, the agent's effort falls short of the target, inducing guilt, which must be compensated by a...

Recent literature has questioned the existence of a learning foundation for the partially cursed equilibrium. This paper closes the gap by showing that a partially cursed equilibrium corresponds to a particular analogy-based expectation equilibrium.