We study intermediaries who seek to maximize gains from trade in bilateral negotiations. Intermediaries are players: they cannot commit to act against their objective function and deny, in some cases, trade they believe to be beneficial. This impairs their ability to assist the parties relative...

Platform-run marketplaces may exploit third-party sellers' data to develop competing products, but potential for future competition can deter sellers' entry. We explore how this trade-off affects the platform's referral fee and its own entry decision. We first characterize the platform's optimal...

The paper reports on an experiment on two-player double-auction bargaining with private values. We consider a setting with discrete two-point overlapping distributions of traders' valuations, in which there exists a fully efficient equilibrium. We show that if there are traders that behave...

The endowment and attachment effect are empirically well-documented in bilateral trade situations. Yet, the theoretical literature has so far failed to formally identify these effects. We ftll this gap by introducing expectations-based loss aversion, which can explain both effects, into the...

We present a three-person, two-period bargaining game with private information. A single proposer is seeking to secure agreement to a proposal under either majority or unanimity rule. If the first period proposal fails, the game ends immediately with an exogenously given "breakdown" probability....

We present a model of anonymous collective bargaining where individuals preferences and information may be significantly interdependent. We show that the bargaining outcome becomes independent of individuals preferences and information as the bargaining group increases in size. As a corollary,...

A principal hires an agent to acquire costly information that will influence the decision of a third party. While the realized piece of information is observable and contractible, the experimental process is not. Assuming a general family of information cost functions (inclusive of Shannon's...

This paper considers general games in which multiple informed principals simultaneously compete to influence the decisions of a common agent. It shows that we can characterize all outcomes of any game in which principals delegate the final decisions to the agent using arbitrary mechanisms, by...

We consider a situation where a decision maker gathers information from two or more imperfectly informed experts. Private information is (conditionally) correlated across players, and communication is cheap talk. We show that with two experts correlation unambiguously tightens the conditions on...

We consider a situation in which a decision maker solicits information from two partially informed experts with uncertain biases. Experts’ private information about an underlying state might be conditionally correlated across them. We show that although correlation tightens the conditions on...