We develop a private-information model of union contract negotiations in which disputes signal a firm's willingness to pay. Previous models have assumed that all labor disputes take the form of a strike. Yet a prominent feature of U.S. collective bargaining is the holdout: negotiations often...

We study wage bargaining in which the union is uncertain about the firm's willingness to pay and threat payoffs vary over time. Strike payoffs change over time as replacement workers are hired, as strikers find temporary jobs, and as inventories or strike funds run out. We find that bargaining...

We present a bargaining model of union contract negotiations, in which the union decides between two threats: the union can strike or continue to work under the expired contract. The model makes predictions about the level of dispute activity and the form the disputes take. Strike incidence...

Bargaining often occurs between parties with some shared interest. Partnerships, joint ventures, and cross ownership are examples. We extend standard bargaining models to allow for joint ownership. Joint ownership reduces costly bargaining disputes, as bargainers’ interests are more aligned....

Labor disputes are an intriguing feature of the landscape of industrialized economies. Economists have had a long-standing interest in formulating a framework for understanding and analyzing labor disputes. The development of noncooperative bargaining theory provided the tools for a theory of...

The resolution of any bargaining conflict depends crucially on the relative urgency of the agents to reach agreement and the information each agent has about the others' preferences. This paper explores, within the context of an infinite-horizon bargaining model with two-sided uncertainty, how...

The role of strategic delay is analyzed in an infinite-horizon alternating-offer model of bargaining. A buyer and seller are engaged in the trade of a single object. Both bargainers have private information about their own preferences and are impatient in that delaying agreement is costly. An...

A central question in economics is understanding the difficulties that parties have in reaching mutually beneficial agreements. Informational differences provide an appealing explanation for bargaining inefficiencies. This chapter provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical literature...

A buyer and seller alternate making offers until an offer is accepted or someone terminates negotiations. The seller's valuation is common knowledge, but the buyer's valuation is known only by the buyer. Impatience to reach an agreement comes from two sources: the traders discount future payoffs...

The introductory discussion presented in this chapter considers the simplest type of sequential bargaining games in which the players' time preferences are described by known and fixed discount rates. I begin by characterizing the class of perfect bargaining mechanisms, which satisfy the...