Estimating Noncooperative and Cooperative Models of Bargaining: An Empirical Comparison

This paper examines the issue of model selection in studies of strategic situations. In particular, we compare estimation results from Adachi and Watanabe's (2008) noncooperative formulation of government formulation with those from two alternative cooperative formulations. Although the estimates of the ministerial ranking are similar, statistical testing suggests that Adachi and Watanabe's(2008) noncooperative formulation is best fitted to the observed data among the alternative models. This result implies that modeling the time structure in bargaining situations is crucially important at the risk of possibly misspecifying the details of the game.