We ask how bargainers' incentives to communicate about more efficient widget designs depend on whether they negotiate price prior to, or after, fixing the traded design. We find three effects: (1) Since communication reveals information about preferences, bargainers with little power prefer to...

We identify conditions under which a bargainer makes inefficiently large (small) investments in a search for information about the opponent's reservation price. The analysis starts with the observation that a player will invest too much (too little) if the opponent's expected payoff is...