Delays in Multilateral Trade Negotiations: An Experimental Study

This paper aims to derive policy implications for real trade negotiations from experiments on multilateral legislative bargaining games. The experiment results reveal that the existence of a strong player with veto power could delay the games. Considering the similarity between the games with the veto player and multilateral trade negotiations such as the Doha Development Agenda (DDA), this paper argues that strong countries such as the G-4 (the United States, the European Community, Brazil, and India) may cause delays in the negotiations. Based on experimental findings, this paper suggests group negotiations as a policy option for the DDA. © 2012 The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.