Bounded Rationality and Alternating-Offer Bargaining

We study the equilibrium outcomes of two-person bargaining problems in which each party has "outside option" known only to himself. We examin two game forms, a sequential-move game and a simulteneous-move game. In this context we discuss the failure to reach agreements and the loss of efficiency thereof. Invoking the analogy between the sequentialmove game and the familiar ultimatum game we also provide new interpretation of the experimental evidence regarding the players behavior in the ultimatum game.

Journal of Mathematical Economics, 2010

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players who jointly own this object. The players are asymmetrically informed about the object's value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no depreciation during the bargaining process which involves signalling of private information. We characterise the perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome of this game which is unique if offers are required to be strictly increasing. Equilibrium agreement is reached gradually and non-deterministically. The better informed player obtains a rent. (JEL C73, C78, D44, D82, J12.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology Department of …, 2001

2006

This paper investigates the uniqueness of subgame perfect (SP) payoffs in a sequential bargaining game. Players are completely informed and the surplus to be allocated follows a geometric Brownian motion. This bargaining problem has not been analysed exhaustively in a stochastic environment. The aim of this paper is to provide a technique to identify the subgame perfect equilibria, i.e. the timing of the agreement and the SP payoff at which agreement occurs. Even though the main focus is on the uniqueness of the equilibrium, we investigate other features of the equilibrium, such as the Pareto efficiency of the outcome and the relation with the Nash axiomatic approach. * Comments are welcome. We are very grateful to William Perraudin and Raymond Brummelhuis for helpful suggestions and discussions.

Journal of Economic Theory, 1993

Dynamic Games and Applications, 2020

We study the emergence of reference points in a bilateral, infinite horizon, alternating offers bargaining game. Players' preferences exhibit reference dependence, and their current offers have the potential to influence each other's future reference points. However, this influence is limited in that it expires in a finite number of periods. We first construct a subgame perfect equilibrium that involves an immediate agreement and study its properties. Later, we also show the existence of an equilibrium where agreement is reached with delay. We show that expiration lengths and initial reference points play a crucial role for the existence of this equilibrium. For instance, we show that equilibrium with a delayed agreement does not exist when the initial reference point is (0, 0). Finally, we provide comparative static analyses on model parameters, compare two variations of our model, and compare our findings with those of the closest paper to ours, Driesen et al. (Math Soc Sci 64:103-118, 2012).

Mathematical Social Sciences, 2012

The Rubinstein alternating offers bargaining game is reconsidered under the assumption that each player is loss averse and the associated reference point is equal to the highest turned down offer of the opponent in the past. This makes the payoffs and therefore potential equilibrium strategies dependent on the history of play. A subgame perfect equilibrium is constructed, in which the strategies depend on the history of play through the current reference points. It is shown that this equilibrium is unique under some assumptions that it shares with the equilibrium in the classical model: immediate acceptance of equilibrium offers, indifference between acceptance and rejection of such offers, and strategies depending only on the current reference points. It is also shown that in this equilibrium loss aversion is a disadvantage. Moreover, a relation with asymmetric Nash bargaining is established, where a player's bargaining power is negatively related to own loss aversion and positively to the opponent's loss aversion.

pluto.huji.ac.il

In a widely quoted work, Binmore, Rubinstein, and Wolinsky (1986) (henceforth, BRW) have shown that the unique subgame-perfect equilibrium of strategic (complete information) alternating offers bargaining models-one with risk of breakdown; the other with time preference-yield, at the continuous time limit, the same allocations as does the cooperative Nash solution. This result is interpreted by BRW as demonstrating a close compatibility

Journal of Economics Zeitschrift f�r National�konomie, 1994

This paper endogenously determines the order of offers and the duration of delay in reaching agreement between buyers and sellers in a continuous-time bargaining game in which a seller wishes to vend an object of known cost to a buyer, to whom the value of the good is private information, and in which each player can choose to strategically delay a response to a previous offer or to interrupt the delay of his rival. Both buyers and sellers are shown to prefer to move first in a model of bargaining in which: (1) either player can make the first offer; (2) after the minimum time has elapsed from the previous offer, either player can make an offer; and (3) players can choose to strategically delay and refrain from making an offer after the previous offer. When the buyer moves first, the equilibrium response for the seller is to accept the offer immediately. When the seller moves first the equilibrium is characterized by the seller making all but the last offer, with minimal feasible delay between successive offers. Observable endogenous delay in reaching an agreement in such equilibria approaches zero as the minimal feasible delay between offers approaches zero. This indicates that in noncooperative bargaining models with private information, where players can strategically delay their offers, endogenizing the order in which players make offers removes the ability of informational asymmetries to generate equilibria exhibiting endogenous delay in reaching an agreement.

This paper studies infinite-horizon bargaining between a seller and multiple buyers when externalities are present. We extend the analysis in Jehiel & Moldovanu (1995a), by allowing for both pure and mixed equilibria. This extension is warranted, since under some circumstances,the complexity of the equilibria with bounded recall they analyze tend to infinity as players become very patient. We show that stationary subgame perfect equilibria always exist. Moreover, a characterization of the stationary subgame perfect equilibria in generic games is presented. Equilibria with delay exist only for strong positive externalities. Since ach buyer receives a positive payoff when the seller agrees with some other buyer, positive externalities induces a war of attrition between buyers. Furthermore, the results when analyzing mixed stationary equilibria are different than when focusing on pure strategies with bounded recall as Jehiel & Moldovanu (1995a). Specifically, they find delay only when ...