Focal points for private bargaining occur every instance the tax law provides a tax election that directly affects multiple taxpayers. These elections explicitly enable, and actually incentivize, the taxpayers to cooperate in order to reduce their aggregate tax burden. For example, divorced...

We provide three alternative characterizations of the proportional solution defined on compact and comprehensive bargaining problems with claims that are not necessarily convex. One characterization result is obtained by using, together with other standard axioms, two solidarity axioms. Another...

It is commonly believed that, since unanimity rule safeguards the rights of each individual, it protects minorities from the possibility of expropriation, thus yielding more equitable outcomes than majority rule. We show that this is not necessarily the case in bargaining environments. We study...

This paper presents a collective household model in which there are marital gains to assortative spousal matching, individuals face a labor-leisure choice and intra-marital allocations are determined by an endogenous sharing rule that is driven by actual wage earnings. The latter two features of...

We develop a model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by pre-marital investments, the marriage market is characterized by assortative spousal matching, and endogenously-determined sharing rules form the basis of intra-household allocations. By incorporating pre-marital...

We develop a "collective" model of the household in which spousal incomes are determined by pre-marital investments, the marriage market is characterized by assortative matching, and a sharing rule forms the basis of intra-household allocations. We identify the properties of the sharing rules...

Many of the motivating examples and applications of non-cooperative bargaining involve groups bargaining against each other. However, much of the literature ignores the structures of profit sharing within the group. This structure determines the incentives for each player and thereby determines...

This paper studies the problem of endogenous coalition formation in contests: how players organize themselves in groups when faced with the common objective of securing a prize by exerting costly effort. The model presented adopts an axiomatic approach by assuming certain properties for the...

Typically, economics assumes that property rights over productive resources or goods are perfectly defined and costlessly enforced. The costs of insecurity and the resultant conflict are, however, real and often economically significant. In this paper, we examine how international trade regimes...

We consider a dynamic setting in which two sovereign states with overlapping ownership claims on a resource/asset first arm and then choose whether to resolve their dispute violently through war or peacefully through settlement. Both approaches depend on the states' military capacities, but...