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 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...

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...

We revisit the Nash model for two-person bargaining. A mediator knows agents' ordinal preferences over feasible proposals, but has incomplete information about their acceptance thresholds. We provide a behavioural characterisation under which the mediator recommends a proposal that maximises the...

The paper proves, by construction, the existence of Markovian equilibria in a model of dynamic spatial legislative bargaining. Players bargain over policies in an infinite horizon. In each period, a majority vote takes place between the proposal of a randomly selected player and the status-quo,...

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...

This paper presents the results of an experiment performed to test the properties of an innovative bargaining mechanism (called automated negotiation) used to resolve disputes arising from Internetbased transactions. Automated negotiation is an online sealed-bid process in which an automated...

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...

I revisit the Rubinstein (1982) model for the classic problem of price hag- gling 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...