In a study of alternating offer bargaining with discounting, perfect equilibrium was found to have little predictive power under the conventional assumption that bargainers' utility is measured by their monetary payoffs. Instead, the authors' data exhibit a first mover advantage, independent of...

The histories of seven regional markets for new physicians and surgeons in the United Kingdom are considered. Like the American market, these markets have experienced failures that led to the adoption of centralized market mechanisms. Because different regions employ different centralized...

Laboratory data from bargaining experiments have started a debate about the prospects for various parts of game theory as descriptive theories of observable behavior and about whether, to what extent, and how a successful descriptive theory must take into account peoples' perceptions of...

This paper concerns the difficulties associated with establishing a time at which a market will operate. The authors first describe the experience of several dozen markets and submarkets, from entry-level professional labor markets in the United States, Canada, England, and Japan to the...

The potential transactions evaluated in labor markets before equilibrium is identified involve rejected offers. After an initial phase in which many offers can be made simultaneously, a new offer cannot be made until an outstanding offer is rejected, so even a small time required to process...

The authors examine learning in all experiments they could locate involving one hundred periods or more of games with a unique equilibrium in mixed strategies, and in a new experiment. They study both the ex post ('best fit') descriptive power of learning models, and their ex ante predictive...