This paper considers social contracts (or mechanisms) in negotiations with incomplete information in which an outside option is a probabilistic conflict and a peaceful agreement is ex ante efficient. Applications include partnership, labor-management bargaining, pretrial negotiations, and...

Two players with preferences distorted by the focusing effect (Koszegi and Szeidl, 2013) negotiate an agreement over several issues and one transfer. We show that, as long as their preferences are differentially distorted, an issue will be inefficiently left out of the agreement or inefficiently...

Belligerents could in principle avoid the ex post costs of conflict by revealing all private information about their violent capabilities and then calculating odds of success ex ante. Incentives to misrepresent private information for strategic gain, however, can cause miscalculations that lead...

Recent studies in general are positive regarding the effectiveness of US counterinsurgency programs in Iraq. The right mix of coercion, ethnic strategy, and public goods provision, it is argued, makes Iraqis less likely to rebel against the US army and the Iraqi government, thus reducing...

Leveraging an established exercise in negotiation education, we build a novel dataset for studying how the use of language shapes bilateral bargaining. Our dataset extends existing work in two ways: 1) we recruit participants via behavioral labs instead of crowdsourcing platforms and allow...

This paper analyzes reputational bargaining between two parties who can strategically send an ultimatum to resolve the conflict by law. Each party is either a justified player who is inflexible about demand and resolves the conflict by law whenever possible, or an unjustified player who is...

I consider two-person bargaining problems in which mechanism is selected at the almost ex ante stage---when there is some positive probability that players may have learned their private types---and the chosen mechanism is implemented at the interim stage. For these problems, I define almost ex...

In bargaining and negotiations, should one make the first offer or wait for the opponent to do it? Practitioners support the idea that moving first in bargaining is a mistake, while researchers find strong evidence that first-movers benefit from an anchor effect. This paper addresses these...

This paper studies independence of higher claims and independence of irrelevant claims on the domain of bargaining problems with claims. Independence of higher claims requires that the payoff of an agent does not depend on the higher claim of another agent. Independence of irrelevant claims...

This paper takes an axiomatic bargaining approach to bankruptcy problems with nontransferable utility by characterizing bankruptcy rules in terms of properties from bargaining theory. In particular, we derive new axiomatic characterizations of the proportional rule, the truncated proportional...