a direct mechanism characterization of sequential bargaining with one sided incomplete information we characterize the sequential equilibria of a class of infinite horizon bargaining games with one sided incomplete information when the seller the uninformed party makes all the offers we prove a folk theorem every incentive compatible individually rational direct bargaining mechanism is implementable by sequential equilibria introducing buyer counteroffers eliminates outcomes which are unfavorable to that party as the proportion of buyer offers increases the set of implementable mechanisms shrinks continuously when the proportion reaches one only the single outcome most favorable to the buyer remains thus depending on the offer structure sequentiality may or may not impose restrictions beyond static incentive compatibility

the role of strategic information transmission in a bargaining model although uncertainty about opponents valuations can result in ineffici ent outcomes in bargaining models it may not be in the private inter est of either party to reveal their valuation to the other it is sho wn that if each can send a verifiable signal which partially reveals their valuations then efficient trade is possible if optimal signal s characterized in the paper are used under two sided uncertainty both parties share in the increased joint surplus which results from this communication a mediator may be able to play a role in constru cting optimal signals copyright 1987 by royal economic society

on the redundancy of the implicit welfarist axiom in bargaining theory abstract nash s characterization of his famous bargaining solution has long faced the objection of being welfarist a bargaining situation is captured by a utility possibility set and a utility vector prevailing in case of disagreement with no further information regarding the underlying economic environment the present paper shows that a straightforward adaptation of nash s axioms in a natural economic environment with lotteries does characterize his solution a similar result holds for kalai and smorodinsky s 8 characterization of their solution if and only if the domain contains multiple goods the non welfarist characterization of the nash solution extends to a larger class of preferences that accommodate some forms of non expected utility

bargaining search and outside options abstract this paper studies a two sided incomplete information bargaining model between a seller and a buyer the buyer has an outside option which is modeled as a sequential search process during which he can choose to return to bargaining at any time two cases are considered in regime i both agents have symmetric information about the search parameters we find that in contrast to bargaining with complete information the option to return to bargaining is not redundant in equilibrium however the no delay result still holds in regime ii where agents have asymmetric information about the outside option delay is possible the solution characterizes the parameters for renegotiation and those for search with no return to the bargaining table

efficient bilateral trade with statistically dependent beliefs abstract this paper derives a necessary and sufficient condition for ex post efficient trade to be feasible when trader beliefs can be statistically dependent allowing for dependent beliefs produces equilibrium and comparative statics behavior that differs qualitatively from that observed in bilateral trade models in which traders have independent beliefs

reputation in bargaining national football league contract negotiations michael conlin i introduction the notion of reputation has been used to explain everything from limit pricing to the chain store paradox to cooperation in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma game robert wilson 1985 states that reputation can explain many behaviors perhaps too many it is too easy to suppose that there is an unobserved state variable called reputation that explains all that happens the better approach is to develop a well specified model in which the effects of reputation are delineated 27 wilson also discusses the difficulty of empirically testing the effects of reputation this difficulty has led researchers such as camerer and weigelt 1988 to perform controlled experiments designed to test these effects this article develops a wellspecified bargaining model in which reputation effects are analyzed a unique data set of national football league nfl player contracts allows me to empirically test the predictions of my model many bargaining games do not occur in isolation rather individuals often negotiate in several bargaining games sequentially for example a union representative often negotiates a sequence of contracts for different locals and a lawyer who represents a number of different clients in sequence may negotiate out of court settlements professional sports teams and professional athletes illustrate another example of sequential bargaining sports teams negotiate with a number of players sequentially in an effort to reach contractual agreements this article addresses the issue of reputation effects in a sequence of bargaining games reputation effects refer to an individual s actions in a bargaining game providing some information about the individual which influences his actions and his opponents beliefs about those actions in subsequent bargaining games in this manner the outcome of a bargaining game has predictive powers on the outcome of subsequent bargaining games this article presents a model in which a buyer faces a sequence of two bargaining games with different sellers the model addresses how reputation effects influence sequential bargaining games by having the buyer s valuation be positively correlated across bargaining games each bargaining game is structured as a war of attrition game where both the buyer and seller can either make a conceding offer continue negotiating or terminate negotiations at any time there are costs per unit time incurred by the buyer and seller during negotiations and their surpluses are discounted after a certain time a unique sequential equilibrium outcome is calculated from which well defined comparative static results are obtained the model is applied to nfl contract negotiations where the team is the buyer who negotiates with different players sequentially the surpluses of the buyer and seller are discounted after the start of training camp based on the commonly held belief that a player s expected performance is adversely affected by missing the start of training camp conlin 1999 finds empirical support for this belief 1 the comparative static results are empirically tested using rookie contract data of players selected in the 1986 through 1991 nfl drafts these empirical results suggest that an nfl team s contract negotiations are affected by the terms agreed to in prior contract negotiations with different players and when these terms were agreed upon the article is organized in the following manner section ii presents a brief literature review on reputation and bargaining and discusses this study s contribution section iii describes a model of two bargaining games where a single buyer negotiates with different sellers sequentially section iv discusses the nfl draft the contract negotiation process for those players drafted and nfl rookie contracts section v relates the model to nfl rookie contract negotiations section vi summarizes the nfl contract data and section vii describes empirical tests of the model s comparative static results

bargaining and reputation an experiment on bargaining in the presence of behavioural types we conduct a series of laboratory experiments to understand what role commitment and reputation play in bargaining the experiments implement the abreu and gul 2000 bargaining model that demonstrates how introducing behavioral types which are obstinate in their demands creates incentives for all players to build reputations for being hard bargainers the data are qualitatively consistent with the theory as subjects mimic induced types furthermore we find evidence for the presence of complementary types whose initial demands acquiesce to induced behavioural demands however there are quantitative deviations from the theory subjects make aggressive demands too often and participate in longer conflicts before reaching agreements overall the results suggest that the abreu and gul 2000 model can be used to gain insights to bargaining behavior particularly in environments where the process underlying obstinate play is well established

bargaining with two sided incomplete information an infinite horizon model with alternating offers this paper examines an infinite horizon bargaining model incorporating five features two sided incomplete information with potentially information revealing strategies an infinite horizon uncertainty concerning the potential gains from trade an illumination of interesting qualitative bargaining issues and plausible free from arbitrarily specified out of equilibrium conjectures equilibria these features motivated in the paper have powerful implications a nash equilibrium exists and is generically both unique and sequential comparative static implications of variations in the game s specifications are developed we find that natural indications of bargaining strength emerge from the model and establish the intuitive result that an increase in a player s relative bargaining strength makes that player more likely to capture the gains from bargaining

bargaining with arrival of new traders we study dynamic bargaining with asymmetric information and arrival of exogenous events which represent arrival of traders or information we char acterize the unique limit of stationary equilibria with frequent offers the possi bility of arrivals changes equilibrium dynamics there is delay in equilibrium and the seller slowly screens out buyers with higher valuations the seller pay off equals what he can achieve by simply awaiting an arrival in applications when buyer valuations fall average prices drop and delay increases surplus division depends on relative arrival rates of buyers sellers and expected time to trade is a nonmonotonic function of the arrival rate

reputation and imperfect information abstract a common observation in the informal literature of economics and elsewhere is that is multistage games players may seek early in the game to acquire a reputation for being tough or benevolent or something else but this phenomenon is not observed in some formal game theoretic analyses of finite games such as selten s finitely repeated chain store game or in the finitely repeated prisoners dilemma we reexamine selten s model adding to it a small amount of imperfect or incomplete information about players payoffs and we find that this addition is sufficient to give rise to the reputation effect that one intuitively expects

a non cooperative bargaining theory with incomplete information verifiable types abstract we consider a non cooperative sequential bargaining game with incomplete information where two players negotiate for mechanisms with ex post verifiable types at the interim stage we prove the existence of a stationary sequential equilibrium of the bargaining game where the ex post nash bargaining solution with no delay is asymptotically implemented with probability one further the ex post nash bargaining solution is a unique outcome of a stationary equilibrium under the property of independence of irrelevant types iit whereby the response of every type of a player is independent of allocations proposed to his other types and under a self selection property of their belief

abstraction and product categories as explanatory variables for food consumption this study sets out to explore variation in the consumer choice structure in relation to three types of products with different levels of search experience and credence attributes the decision structures of rice wine and functional food experience search and credence products consumers were explored by means of laddering the results suggest the presence of an emotional component in foods that increases in complexity becomes more abstract with the number of credence attributes the findings recommend adjusting the complexity of advertising campaigns and product positioning to the type of product being promoted

bargaining and reputation the paper develops a reputation based theory of bargaining the idea is to investigate and highlight the influence of bargaining postures on bargaining outcomes a complete information bargaining model a la rubinstein is amended to accommodate irrational types who are obstinate and indeed for tractability assumed to be completely inflexible in their offers and demands a strong independence of procedures result is derived after initial postures have been adopted the bargaining outcome is independent of the fine details of the bargaining protocol so long as both players have the opportunity to make offers frequently the latter analysis yields a unique continuous time limit with a war of attrition structure in the continuous time game equilibrium is unique and entails delay consequently inefficiency the equilibrium outcome reflects the combined influence of the rates of time preference of the players and the ex ante probabilities of different irrational types as the probability of irrationality goes to zero delay and inefficiency disappear furthermore if there is a rich set of types for both agents the limit equilibrium payoffs are inversely proportional to their rates of time preference

reputational bargaining with minimal knowledge of rationality two players announce bargaining postures to which they may become committed and then bargain over the division of a surplus the share of the surplus that a player can guarantee herself under first order knowledge of rationality is determined as a function of her probability of becoming committed as is the bargaining posture that she must announce in order to guarantee herself this much this maxmin share of the surplus is large relative to the probability of becoming committed e g it equals 30 if the commitment probability is 1 in 10 and equals 13 if the commitment probability is 1 in 1000 and the corresponding bargaining posture simply demands this share plus compensation for any delay in reaching agreement

endogeneity of alternating offers in a bargaining game we investigate an infinite horizon two person simultaneous move bargaining game with incomplete information and discounted payoffs the game takes the form of a concession game in each period each player chooses to give in or hold out the game continues until at least one of the players chooses to give in at which point agreement has been reached and the game terminates for any discount factor if the players priors about each other s type are sufficiently asymmetric there is a unique nash equilibrium in which the two players alternate in their willingness to give in

uncertainty about uncertainty and delay in bargaining we study a one sided offers bargaining game in which the buyer has private information about the value of the object and the seller has private information about his beliefs about the buyer s valuation we show that this uncertainty about uncertainties dramatically changes the set of outcomes in particular second order beliefs can lead to a delay in reaching agreement even when the seller makes frequent offers we show that not all types of second order beliefs lead to a delay when the buyer assigns positive probability to the seller knowing the buyer s value then delay not only can occur but it must occur for a class of equilibria however in all other cases delay will never occur

breakdown in multilateral negotiations abstract we analyze a complete information multilateral bargaining model in which a buyer is to purchase two complementary goods from two sellers binding cash offer contracts are used to govern transactions in contrast to preexisting literature we do not normalize the parties reservation utilities to zero we show that this assumption holds critical importance by demonstrating that a complete breakdown of negotiations may occur as the unique equilibrium outcome even if only two sellers are present

strategic delay in bargaining with two sided uncertainty the role of strategic delay is analyzed in an infinite horizon alternating offer model of bargaining a buyer and seller are engaged in the trade of a single object both bargainers have private information about their own preferences and are impatient in that delaying agreement is costly an equilibrium is constructed in which the bargainers signal the strength of their bargaining positions by delaying prior to making an offer a bargainer expecting large gains from trade is more impatient than one expecting small gains and hence makes concessions earlier on trade occurs whever gains from trade exist but due to the private information only after costly delay panmunjom korea upi the american general and the north korean general glared at each other across the table and the only sound was the wind howling across the barren hills outside their hut maj gen james b knapp negotiator for the united nations command unc was waiting for maj gen ri choonsun of the democratic people s republic of north korea to propose a recess they sat there arms folded for 42 hours not a word finally gen ri got up walked out and drove away evening bulletin philadelphia 11 april 1969

bargaining with incomplete information an infinite horizon model with two sided uncertainty the resolution of any bargaining conflict depends crucially on the relative urgency of the agents to reach agreement and the information each agent has about the others preferences this paper explores within the context of an infinite horizon bargaining model with two sided uncertainty how timing and information affect the rational behaviour of agents when commitment is not possible since the bargainers are uncertain about whether trade is desirable they must communicate some of their private information before an agreement can be reached this need for learning due to incomplete information about preferences results in bargaining inefficiencies trade often occurs after costly delay thus the model provides an explanation for the inefficient bargaining behaviour that appears to occur often in practice

bargaining under incomplete information this paper presents and analyzes a bargaining model of bilateral monopoly under uncertainty under the bargaining rule proposed the buyer and the seller each submit sealed offers that determine whether the good in question is sold and the transfer price the nash equilibrium solution of this bargaining game implies an offer strategy of each party that is monotonic in its own reservation price and depends on its assessment of the opponent s reservation price issues of relative bargaining advantage and efficiency are examined for a number of special cases finally we discuss the appropriateness of the nash solution concept

bargaining and search with recall a two period model with complete information two standard results of previous bargaining models state that delay is generally not expected to occur under complete information and bargaining outcome depends crucially on the bargainers intrinsic characteristics that determine their reservation prices and in general bargainers with better reservation prices tend to get better outcomes this paper considers a bilateral bargaining problem with complete information in which one of the bargainers the buyer is allowed to search while bargaining more importantly we assume that the buyer is allowed to recall past outside offers we find that quite contrary to the standard results of previous complete information bargaining models complete information renders no guarantee for immediate resolution of bargaining and the effect of changing the buyer s search cost on each player s bargaining outcome is unpredictable the major driving force of these two results is the assumption that the buyer can recall past outside offers

dynamic bargaining with transaction costs a buyer and seller alternate making offers until an offer is accepted or someone terminates negotiations the seller s valuation is common knowledge but the buyer s valuation is known only by the buyer impatience to reach an agreement comes from two sources the traders discount future payoffs and there are transaction costs of bargaining equilibrium behavior involves either immediate trade delayed trade or immediate termination depending on the size of the gains from trade and the relative bargaining costs this contrasts with the pure discounting model where termination never occurs and the pure transaction cost model where delayed trade never occurs

on the interpretation of the nash bargaining solution and its extension to non expected utility preferences the paper reexamines the foundations of the axiomatic nash bargaining theory more specifically it questions the interpretation of the nash bargaining solution and extends it to a family of non expected utility preferences a bargaining problem is presented as x d 2 where x is a set of feasible agreements described in physical terms d is the disagreement event and 1 and 2 are preferences defined on the space of lotteries in which the prizes are the elements in x and d the ordinal nash bargaining solution is defined as an agreement y satisfying for all p e 0 1 and for all x e x if px 1 y then py 2 x and if px 2 y then py x where px is the lottery which gives x with probability p and d with probability 1 p revisions of the pareto symmetry and iia axioms characterize the ordinal nash bargaining solution in the expected utility case this definition is equivalent to that of the nash bargaining solution however this definition is to be preferred since it allows a statement of the nash bargaining solution in everyday language and makes possible its natural extension to a wider set of preferences it also reveals the logic behind some of the more interesting results of the nash bargaining solution such as the comparative statics of risk aversion and the connection between the nash bargaining solution and strategic models

alternating offer bargaining with two sided incomplete information i study alternating offer bargaining games with two sided incomplete information about the players discount rates for both perfect bayesian equilibrium and a rationalizability style notion i characterize the set of expected payoffs which may arise in the game i also construct bounds on agreements that may be made the set of expected payoffs is easy to compute and incorporate into applied models my main result is a full characterization of the set of perfect bayesian equilibrium payoffs for games in which the distribution over the players discount rates is of wide support yet is in a weak sense close to a point mass distribution i prove a lopsided convergence result each player cannot gain from a slight chance that she is a strong type but the player can suffer greatly if there is a slight chance that she is a weak type

the pricing of experience goods the example of en primeur wine the market for primeur wine in the bordeaux region allows producers to sell wine that is still in barrels as with all experience goods producers send quality signals to uninformed buyers using original data on bordeaux wines we show that the pricing behavior of producers depends to a large extent on their reputation and much less on short term changes in quality as measured by experts grades we also find that the primeur price has an informative role since a 10 increase in primeur price leads to a 3 increase in prices on the market for bottled wine

gambling reputation repeated bargaining with outside options we study the role of incomplete information and outside options in determining bargaining postures and surplus division in repeated bargaining between a long run player and a sequence of short run players the outside option is not only a disagreement point but reveals information privately held by the long run player in equilibrium the uninformed short run players offers do not always respond to changes in reputation and the informed long run player s payoffs are discontinuous the long run player invokes inefficient random outside options repeatedly to build reputation to a level where the subsequent short run players succumb to his extraction of a larger payoff but he also runs the risk of losing reputation and relinquishing bargaining power we investigate equilibrium properties when the discount factor goes to 1 and when the informativeness of outside options diffuses in both cases bargaining outcomes become more inefficient and the limit reputation building probabilities are interior publication abstract

a cardinal characterization of the rubinstein safra thomson axiomatic bargaining theory in a recent paper rubinstein safra and thomson rst have provided an interesting re examination of the widely applied nash solution for a two person bargaining problem they recast the usual nash bargaining problem into a more natural setting of feasible alternatives with a disagreement outcome the two players are then described by their risk preferences defined on the set of lotteries over the alternatives and the disagreement outcome this enables them to define an ordinal nash solution in terms of the agents risk preferences essentially their ordinal solution is an outcome that is immune against possible objections freeing the definition of the nash solution from utility naturally led rst to extending its scope to non expected utility neu preferences we contend however that the family of neu preferences considered by rst is unduly restrictive the assumptions imposed on the risk preferences by rst essentially exclude any members of the rank dependent expected utility rdeu and betweenness families that can accommodate the very choice paradoxes that stimulated the development of neu theory as these are two of the most extensively analyzed and widely applied neu models in the literature this seems to cast doubt on how broad an extension to neu preferences the rst approach affords we demonstrate however that rst s analysis can be modified so that their conclusion is valid in a wider class of preferences that can include examples of rdeu preferences this class consists of preferences that admit what we term a disagreement linear representation

bargaining and reputation in search markets in a two sided search market agents are paired to bargain over a unit surplus the matching market serves as an endogenous outside option for a bargaining agent behavioral agents are commitment types that demand a constant portion of the surplus the frequency of behavioral types is determined in equilibrium even if the frequency of behavioral types is negligible they aect the terms of trade and eciency in an unbalanced market where the entering

bilateral trading and incomplete information price convergence in a small market abstract we study a model of decentralised bilateral interactions in a small market where one of the sellers has private information about her value in addition to this seller with private information there are two identical buyers and another seller whose valuation is commonly known to be in between the two possible valuations of the seller with private information we consider an infinite horizon game with simultaneous one sided offers and simultaneous responses we construct one particular pbe of the game and show that as the discount factor goes to 1 prices in all transactions converge to the same value we then show that this is the case with any stationary equilibrium of the game that is the asymptotic outcome is unique across all stationary equilibria

a bargaining model with incomplete information about time preferences etude d un jeu de negociation strategique sequentiel avec information incomplete caracterisation d une classe d equilibres sequentiels appeles equilibres sequentiels de negociation et demonstration de l unicite de cet equilibre

shared quality uncertainty and the introduction of indeterminate goods the purpose of this paper is to introduce a new category of goods indeterminate goods which will be compared with the classical framework of experience search and credence goods nelson 1970 darby and karni 1973 this concept sheds new light on the nature and status of quality uncertainty through the following hypothesis uncertainty about the product s quality can be shared by all agents of the market and this uncertainty can be non neutral and disrupt the market we identify three types of shared uncertainty about the product s characteristics and the corresponding problems that can arise shared uncertainty due to the emergence of a product hirschman 1974 shared uncertainty concerning the past of a product basing ourselves on the art market and finally shared uncertainty regarding the future impacts of a product through empirical data on product safety

risk aversion in the theory of expected utility with rank dependent probabilities expected utility with rank dependent probability theory is a model of decision making under risk where the preference relations on the set of probability distributions is represented by the mathematical expectation of a utility function with respect to a transformation of the probability distributions on the set of outcomes this paper defines based on g teaux differentiability measures of risk aversion for such preferences which characterize the relation more risk averse and applies these measures to the analysis of unconditional and conditional portfolio choice problems

uncertainty and delay in bargaining this paper investigates the relationship between uncertainty and delay of agreement in the one sided offer bargaining model with two sided uncertainty where the seller makes offers we construct a weak stationary equilibrium in which different types of the seller charge different prices in every period we completely characterize the separating equilibrium by three regularity conditions and show that the time interval between offers converges to zero the seller s initial price offer in a separating equilibrium converges with probability 1 to the lowest valuation of the buyer if and only if the gain from trading is common knowledge we have witnessed a proliferation of sequential bargaining models that with a few remarkable exceptions fudenberg and tirole 1983 cramton 1984 and chatterjee and samuelson 1987 are based on models with one sided uncertainty the importance of studying bargaining models with one sided uncertainty is that despite their highly special informational structure we can derive valuable insights into the role of uncertainty in the delay in reaching an agreement while keeping the computational exercise tractable however the assumption of one sided uncertainty essentially excludes the situation where the buyer s actual reservation value is lower than the seller s actual reservation value though they are still engaged in the bargaining process the primary objective of this paper is to investigate the role of uncertainty about the gain from trading in a sequential bargaining model with two sided incomplete information in the models with one sided incomplete information important studies fudenberg levine and tirole 1985 and gul sonnenschein and wilson 1986 are often based on weak stationary equilibria where the equilibrium strategy of each player only depends upon the posterior conjecture about the other player and the previous period s offer although the importance of two sided uncertainty and the weak stationary equilibrium is well recognized previous research on sequential bargaining models has not combined the two features within the same framework studies on the models under two sided uncertainty have not focused on weak stationary equilibria for example cramton 1984 computes a specific sequential equilibrium with interesting properties in which the equilibrium strategies of both players depend upon histories in a rather complex fashion on the other hand it is only in models under one sided uncertainty that the weak stationary equilibrium has been extensively studied this paper computes and analyzes the weak stationary equilibria in a model under two sided uncertainty in order to investigate the effect of uncertainty on the delay in agreement we will extend the results from previous studies of one sided uncertainty models the computation of the equilibrium in models with two sided uncertainty is generally very complicated furthermore we must identify a sensible outcome if more than one equilibrium exists in the model to simplify the analysis we choose a standard bargaining

evolutionary stability in a reputational model of bargaining a large and growing literature on reputation in games builds on the insight that the possibility of one or more players being boundedly rational can have significant effects on equilibrium behavior this literature leaves unexplained the presence of behavioral players in the first place as well as the particular forms of irrationality assumed and the population shares of the various types in this paper we endogenize departures from rationality on the basis of an evolutionary stability criterion under the assumption that rational players incur a cost which reflects the greater sophistication of their behavior this cost may be arbitrarily small within the context of a reputational model of bargaining we show that evolutionary stability necessitates the presence of behavioral players it also places significant joint restrictions on the set of behavioral types that can coexist their respective population shares and the long run population share of rational players

axiomatic bargaining theory on economic environments abstract axiomatic bargaining theory is reexamined by focusing upon the economic exhange environment instead of the traditional utility possibility set it is argued that the axioms of the traditional theory impose stronger restrictions than can be supported by their motivating economic intuitions weaker alternative axioms making explicit use of economic information are used to characterize the standard bargaining solutions a key idea is to impose consistency of the solution with respect to changes in the dimension of the commodity space even these weaker economic axioms however may be unrealistic restrictions to impose on the bargaining solution in the context of many economic bargaining problems

appeals immune bargaining solution with variable alternative sets a bargaining solution based on the rubinstein safra thomson ordinal nash outcome is investigated in the peters wakker revealed group preferences framework assuming non expected utility preferences necessary and sufficient conditions are stated on preference pairs in order for the solution to be well defined and axiomatized uniquely

strategic voting over strategic proposals prior research on strategic voting has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad it results in destruction of information and hence makes voters worse off we show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous that is independent of the voting rule used we depart from the existing literature by endogenizing the proposal that is put to a vote and establish that under many circumstances unanimity rule makes voters better off moreover in some cases unanimity rule also makes the proposer better off even when he has diametrically opposing preferences in this case unanimity is the pareto dominant voting rule voters prefer unanimity rule because it induces the proposing individual to make a more attractive proposal the proposing individual prefers unanimity rule because the acceptance probabilities for moderate proposals are higher we apply our results to jury trials and debt restructuring

sharing the wealth when should firms treat customers as partners marketers often stress the importance of treating customers as partners a fundamental premise of this perspective is that all parties can be weakly better off if they work together to increase joint surplus and reach pareto efficient agreements for marketing managers this implies organizing marketing activities in a manner that maximizes total surplus this logic is theoretically sound when agreements between partners are limitless and costless in most consumer marketing contexts business to consumer this is typically not true the question i ask is should one still expect firms to partner with consumers and reach pareto efficient agreements in this paper i use the example of a firm s choice of product configuration to demonstrate two effects first i show that a firm may configure a product in a manner that reduces total surplus but increases firm profits second one might conjecture that increased competition would eliminate this effect but i show that in a duopoly firm profits may be increasing in the cost of product completion this second result suggests that firms may prefer to remain inefficient and or stifie innovations both results violate a fundamental premise of partnering that firms and consumers should work together to increase total surplus and reach pareto efficient agreements the model illustrates that pareto efficient agreements are less likely to occur if negotiation with individual partners is infeasible or costly such as in business to consumer contexts consumer marketers in one to many marketing environments should be wary of treating customers as partners because pareto efficient agreements may not be optimal for their firm

economics food choices and nutrition abstract our goal in this paper is to examine the role and influence of economic factors defined rather broadly on consumer food choices and hence nutritional outcomes we attempt to do this in a non technical fashion we examine the role of prices especially as they relate to the affordability of food in the united states and as a policy lever income is analyzed as a driving force behind changes in eating habits in particular increasing the demand for convenience the role of time constraints as well as time preference are examined as links to healthy eating habits and as forces behind current trends in eating patterns information and knowledge are given prominent play as counter balances to economic forces driving eating habits we conclude with and examination into maternal nutrition knowledge and children s dietary quality

a theory of trade concessions abstract we present a model of tariff disputes and concessions consisting of an infinitely repeated game under bilateral incomplete information given potential agreements to be reached through unilateral or reciprocal concessions we find that an agreement involving reciprocal concessions is reached immediately if the discount factor is large and or the volume of trade is small otherwise prior beliefs about country type matter when both countries hold pessimistic priors immediate reciprocal concessions still occur very different prior beliefs lead to an immediate unilateral concession of the pessimistic country whereas optimistic priors coupled with low discount factors may generate delayed agreements 1997 elsevier science b v all rights reserved

a multistage model of bargaining this paper presents a simple multistage model of bargaining wherein a seller makes an offer that can be either accepted or refused if rejected the process continues how the seller s ability to make commitments affects bargaining outcomes is analysed by comparing the commitment equilibria to those arising when commitment is impossible the effects of increasing uncertainty about preferences and varying the length of the bargaining horizon are analysed the ways in which the bargaining environment can be changed to improve outcomes are discussed

sequential bargaining with incomplete information this paper describes a simple two person two period bargaining game and solves it using the concept of perfect bayesian equilibrium in which the actions of each player convey information which is used by his opponent the paper examines the effects of changes in bargaining costs the size of the contract zone and the length of the bargaining process on such aspects of the solution as the probability of impasse and the likelihood of concessions the combination of information transfer and the lack of pre commitment embodied in perfectness yields many surprising results common perceptions about the effects of parameter changes on bargaining processes are suspect and should be checked in the particular game being discussed