Bargaining with commitments

We study a simple bargaining mechanism in which, given an order of players, the first n−1 players sequentially announce their reservation price. Once these prices are given, the last player may choose a coalition to cooperate with, and pay each member of this coalition his reservation price. The only expected final equilibrium payoff is a new solution concept, the “selective value”, which can be defined by means of marginal contributions vectors of a reduced game. The selective value coincides with the Shapley value for convex games. Moreover, for 3-player games the vectors of marginal contributions determine the core when it is nonempty. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2004