Bargaining with Deadlines and Imperfect Player Control.

This paper presents a game of strategic bargaining under deadlines whose equilibrium conforms to anecdotal and experimental information about real-life bargaining sessions. The model operates in continuous time and incorporates possible strategic delay and imperfect player control over the timing of offers (modeled by means of an exogenous random delay). In the unique symmetric Markov-perfect equilibrium, players adopt strategic delay early in the game, make and reject offers later on, and usually reach agreements late in the game, though they miss the deadline with positive probability. The expected division of the surplus is close to an even split. Copyright 1993 by The Econometric Society.