Many real-life contract agreements actually involve negotiations in which both parties have some bargaining power. However, standard contract theory assumes that the principal holds all of the bargaining power. The literature has typically modeled that with a one-shot game in which the principal makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to the agent. Then, the agent is only able to accept or reject the...

We present a game-theoretic model of bargaining over a metaphor in the context of political communication, find its equilibrium, and use it to rationalize observed linguistic behavior. We argue that game theory is well suited for modeling discourse as a dynamic resulting from a number of conflicting pressures, and suggest applications of interest to computational linguists.

The bargaining approach can be usefully applied to address some classical questions in cooperative game theory. One of these concerns the formation of coalitions and the writing of binding agreements among groups of players. Many years ago, Ronald Coase argued that such negotiations would invariably end in an efficient outcome, and that bargaining power — whatever that is — would be reflected i...

We report an experiment designed to test the influence of noisy commitments on efficiency in a simple bargaining game. We investigate two different levels of commitment reliability in a variant of the peasant-dictator game. Theoretical analysis suggests that the reliability of commitments in this game does not affect efficiency. We find that accurate commitments promote efficiency, as expected ...

A fundamental problem in economics is determining how agreements are reached in situations where the parties have some market power. Of particular interest are questions of efficiency and distribution: • How efficient is the agreement? • How can efficiency be improved? • How are the gains from agreement divided among the parties? Here, I explore these questions in the context of bilateral monop...

We offer a study revealing the mechanisms through which communication helps actual bargaining behavior outperform economic predictions. The possibility of individually strategic behavior in the presence of private information leads to game-theoretic predictions of less than full efficiency. We present a one-stage, simultaneous offers bargaining game in which buyers and sellers have independent,...

This paper focuses on the prominent issue of automating bargaining agents within electronic markets. Models of bargaining in literature deal with settings wherein there are only two agents and no model satisfactorily captures settings in which there is competition among buyers, being they more than one, and analogously among sellers. In this paper, we extend the principal bargaining protocol, i...

We study the nature versus nurture distinction in bargaining behavior across gender, by observing the negotiation culture in matrilineal and patriarchal societies. Combining data from a laboratory experiment and a natural field experiment conducted in matrilineal and patriarchal societies permits us to explore how culture affects bargaining behavior. One interesting result is that in both the a...

This paper examines pricing policies for OPEC under the assumption that the cartel is composed of a block of s/~e~t/~r countries with large cash needs and a t.lock of .yuI’ercountrics with little immediate need for cash and a loHcr rate of discount. The decision problem for the twopart cartel is embodied in a game-theoretic framework and the optimal bargaining solution is computed using results...

The high cost associated with the rollout of 3G services encourages operators to share network infrastructure. Network sharing poses a new challenge in devising fair, efficient and Pareto optimal resource allocation strategies to distribute system resources among users of different operators in the network. Cooperative game theory provides a framework for formulating such strategies. In this pa...