agenda restrictions in multi issue bargaining abstract we study a bilateral multi issue bargaining procedure with complete information and endogenous agenda in the procedure proposals must be made on only one issue at a time although the proposer can choose which issue to bring to the table when bargaining frictions are small there is a large multiplicity of equilibrium agreements including ones with delay however equilibrium payoffs cannot be made arbitrarily small perpetual disagreement cannot be supported in equilibrium this multiplicity contrasts with the uniqueness found in the literature for a procedure where offers can be made in any subset of remaining issues

bargaining orders in a multi person bargaining game abstract this paper studies a complete information bargaining game with one buyer and multiple sellers of different sizes or bargaining strengths the bargaining order is determined endogenously with a finite horizon there is a unique subgame perfect equilibrium outcome in which the buyer purchases in order of increasing size from the smallest to the largest with an infinite horizon if the sellers have sufficiently different sizes there is a unique equilibrium outcome which has the same bargaining order if the sellers have similar sizes with an infinite horizon there may be multiple equilibrium outcomes with different bargaining orders

bargaining and strikes strikes are generally regarded as an important economic phenomenon and yet good theoretical explanations of them are hard to come by the difficulty is to understand why rational parties should resort to a wasteful mechanism as a way of distributing the gains from trade why could not both parties be made better off by moving to the final distribution of surplus immediately or if it is uncertain to its certainty equivalent and sharing the benefits from increased production

endogenous incomplete contracts a bargaining approach in this paper we argue that by modelling the contracting process as a bargaining game one can endogenize the choice between complete and incomplete contracts this point is demonstrated within a stylized model in which agents can allocate an endowment stream either via a once for all bargain over the entire stream a long term contract or through a series of bargaining rounds a short term contract within this structure short term contracts arise as equilibrium outcomes under very general conditions because a short term contract implies reduced bargaining costs for one of the agents in essence reduced transaction costs produce a short term contract jel classification l14 c78

on the role of confidentiality and deadlines in bilateral negotiations abstract the preference between public and private negotiations for a buyer who sequentially visits two sellers is examined it is shown that the buyer weakly prefers private negotiations so as to create strategic uncertainty about the trade history with substitute goods such uncertainty is valuable only when price offers have short deadlines that prevent a head to head competition with complementary goods strategic uncertainty is valuable to the extent that price coordination becomes a concern for sellers which is likely to be the case when sellers possess high bargaining powers their price offers have short deadlines and or goods are weak complements sellers strategic deadline choices as well as their incentives to disclose information about negotiations are also investigated

social mobility and inequality in urban china understanding the role of intergenerational transmission of education china s rapid economic growth since the late 1980s has been accompanied by great economic and social transformations which have resulted in a sharp increase in income inequality this article contributes to the literature of social mobility in china by examining the impact of parental education on the education of their children using the 1990 and 2000 chinese population censuses we employ nonparametric estimation strategies to provide a systematic investigation of intergenerational transmission of education in urban china we find evidence of increasing parents children educational correlations our results raise concerns regarding economic inequality in urban china as high intergenerational persistence of education is expected to be a barrier to equal opportunities in children s education attainments and their future labour market outcomes

bargaining piecemeal or all at once perfect information rubinstein style bargaining models are used to explore questions about multiple issue bargaining is it ever sensible to offer on only a subset of the issues being bargained what is the effect of limiting offers so that they must cover all issues we conclude that in realistic settings the answer to the first question is yes and that restricting offers to those covering all issues may be harmful to one or both parties

bargaining with an agenda gradual bargaining is represented by an agenda a family of increasing sets of joint utilities parameterized by time a solution for gradual bargaining specifies an agreement at each time we axiomatize an ordinal solution i e one that is covariant with order preserving transformations of utility it can be viewed as the limit of step by step bargaining in which the agreement of the last negotiation becomes the disagreement point for the next the stepwise agreements may follow the nash solution the kalai smorodinsky solution or many others and still yield the ordinal solution in the limit

the importance of the agenda in bargaining abstract this paper discusses a multi issue bargaining game in which the players set up an agenda and negotiate on the issues sequentially according to this agenda we demonstrate that the agenda might play an important role in the bargaining and discuss the relationship between the agenda and the final outcome of the bargaining game assuming that players have conflicting evaluations regarding the importance of the issues under negotiation we identify the type of agenda each player prefers we also show that in such cases the outcome of the bargaining game need not to be efficient by demonstrating the strategic use of the agenda the paper explains the phenomenon of bargaining on the agenda

delays and partial agreements in multi issue bargaining abstract we model a situation in which two players bargain over two pies one of which can only be consumed starting at a future date suppose the players value the pies asymmetrically one player values the existing pie more than the future one while the other player has the opposite valuation we show that players may consume only a fraction of the existing pie in the first period and then consume the remainder of it along with the second pie at the date at which the second pie becomes available thus our model features a special form of bargaining delay in which agreements take place in multiple stages such partial agreements arise when players are patient enough when they expect the second pie to become available soon and when the asymmetry in their valuations is large enough

worker substitutability and patterns of unionisation a strategic three party bargaining model is developed in which one distinguished party the firm has to reac h agreements with the other two each of which is a group of workers in the prebargaining stage the two worker groups decide whether to organize jointly or separately the main observation relates the equi librium pattern of unionization to the substitutability in production between the two groups the outcome is joint or separate unions acco rding to whether the two groups are substitute or complementary facto rs of production the analysis also considers possibilities for firm s strategic intervention in the unionization process copyright 1988 by royal economic society

managing risks from climate impacted hazards the value of investment flexibility under uncertainty abstract incomplete knowledge about climate change and the related uncertainty in climate prediction makes adaptation inherently difficult we introduce a real options framework to determine the optimal adaptation to catastrophic risk that takes into account climate change uncertainty the framework can be used to select the optimal adaptation project from a number of alternative projects or to determine the optimal investment sequence of the considered projects in applying the model to the management of bushfire risk at a local government area we find that the framework can significantly increase the value of adaptation investment above the current net present value and also improve upon deterministic dynamic models we also find that it is important to consider sequential investment to preserve investment flexibility under the uncertainty of climate change when decision makers can afford multiple investment projects the loss associated with the use of a simple net present value rule can be substantial and it is important to use a deterministic dynamic model or a real options model

a note on multi issue two sided bargaining bilateral procedures abstract this note considers a two sided multi issue bargaining problem in which players that belong to the same side may have conflicting priorities regarding the different negotiated issues the note examines different bilateral bargaining procedures and shows the different equilibrium settlements that they yield in particular the note examines the possibility that group heterogeneity conflicting priorities may be exploited in order to gain a better settlement the different potential outcomes that are implied by the different procedures explain why we often observe such intense negotiation over bargaining procedures moreover the conflict over procedure can be substantial among parties with common interest as well as between opposing players journal of economic literature classification number c7

first things first the agenda formation problem for multi issue committees abstract the paper focuses on sequential bargaining procedures in which parties are allowed to differ in several respects we first highlight the strategic effects in the bargaining game and the often conflicting incentives that players need to take into account in forming their preferences over agendas we then show that there is a pareto superior agenda among the issue by issue procedures this consists in setting the most important issue first unless this is difficult urgent in the sense that there is probability of game breakdown after a rejection in the negotiations over this issue in this case parties prefer to negotiate over the easy issue first

selective acceptance and inefficiency in a two issue complete information bargaining game abstract this paper explores the effects of a selective acceptance rule on the outcome of two issue negotiations the alternating offer game introduced here allows for the possibility that settlement may be reached on one issue while negotiation continues about the other this model captures features of laws that are generally believed to increase efficiency the analysis shows that if one issue is indivisible there are inefficient subgame perfect equilibria with no pareto improving alternative equilibria with opposing valuations rapid communication guarantees inefficiency these are unique examples of this strong form of inefficiency in an alternating offer bargaining game with complete and perfect information journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 j30

the game of negotiations ordering issues and implementing agreements abstract we use a two issue bargaining model with asymmetric information to study agent choice of how to structure bargaining we uncover the settings in which different agenda structures are chosen in equilibrium how the order in which issues are bargained over matters and what impact the rules for implementing agreements have if agreements are implemented as they are reached easy issues are negotiated first and hard issues later if agreements are implemented only after all issues are settled then it is size that matters with large issues settled first all parties prefer the former rules of implementation to the latter

inventorship and authorship as attribution rights an enquiry into the economics of scientific credit abstract authorship and inventorship are attribution rights upon which individual scientists build their reputation and career social and legal norms concerning their distribution within research teams are currently criticized for failing to inform third parties on individual contributions we examine the case of teams engaged in the double disclosure of their research results through both publications and patents and model the negotiation process taking place between junior or female team members and the senior male ones we suggest that the former may give up inventorship in order to secure authorship even when entitled to the both based on a sample of 680 patent publication pairs related sets of patents and publications we show that very frequently one or more authors of a publication do not appear as inventors of a related patent this is less likely to happen for first and last authors which is in accordance both with our model and the prevailing legal norms on inventorship however the probability of exclusion from inventorship also declines with seniority and increases for women which is compatible with our model only

individual heterogeneity in returns to education in urban china during 1995 2002 abstract this paper analyzes the individual level differences in returns to education in urban china from 1995 to 2002 we have uncovered substantial heterogeneity in schooling coefficients and we find that the extent of heterogeneity diminishes over time

bargaining frictions bargaining procedures and implied costs in multiple issue bargaining the paper explores how bargaining frictions and bargaining procedures interact to determine players bargaining costs in multiple issue bargaining settings when bargaining frictions take the form of discounting and agreements are implemented as they are reached issue by issue negotiation can generate bargaining costs different from those that occur if all issues are bargained simultaneously these cost differences result in differences in allocations across bargaining procedures such that players disagree on the desired method of bargaining similar results hold for certain fixed cost bargaining friction specifications this analysis provides a potential explanation of both agenda bargaining and incomplete contracts

negotiations in multi issue committees abstract we propose a non cooperative bargaining approach to the problem of collective decision making in committees by modelling this process as a sequential bargaining game the main objective of the paper is to discuss the formation of the agenda in multi issue committees and its relation to the importance of the issues we start by asserting that in the case of a single issue the set of all equilibrium outcomes of our game coincides with the set of coalitional stable outcomes we then consider multi issue committees to discuss the problem of forming agendas we argue that from the point of view of efficiency and stability the most important issues should be put first on the agenda we conclude with a sufficient condition on players preferences which guarantees the efficiency and stability of the bargaining outcomes for every possible agenda