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...

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...

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...

In the context of international bargaining, standard models predict that a shift in military power can cause preventive war because it changes the relative bargaining position between states. We find that shifts in military power are not the only cause of war under commitment problems and that...

I revisit the Rubinstein (1982) model for the classic problem of price haggling and show that bargaining can become a “trap,” where equilibrium leaves one party strictly worse off than if no transaction took place (e.g., the equilibrium price exceeds a buyer’s valuation). This arises when...

We consider the impact of fairness and moral hazard in a principal-agent bargaining model, where the agent can affect the size of the surplus by his actions. Our main results are as follows; a) the offer predicted by the basic fairness model (excluding moral hazard) results in inefficient...

The United Kingdom will leave the European Union. Brexit will involve many complex negotiations. This paper analyses the negotiation position of the parties (UK, EU, Member States) based on a set of four key negotiation factors: agreement options, non-agreement alternatives, interests, and...

To analyze players' strategic alliance behavior, we introduce a new noncooperative coalitional bargaining model, in which each player can buy out other players with upfront transfers. We uncover the role of an essential player in a transferable utility game, or a veto player in a simple game, in...