This paper compares outcomes from informally negotiated oil and gas leases to those awarded via centralized auction. We focus on Texas, where legislative decisions in the early twentieth century assigned thousands of proximate parcels to different mineral allocation mechanisms. We show that...

We present a bargaining model of the interaction between a government and interest groups in which, unlike most existing models, neither side is assumed to have all the bargaining power. The government finds it optimal to constrain itself in the use of transfer policies to improve its bargaining...

We develop a tractable model of strategic debt renegotiation in which businesses are sequentially interconnected through their liabilities. This financing structure, which we refer to as a debt chain, gives rise to externalities as a lender’s willingness to provide concessions to his...

The sovereign-debt literature has often implicitly assumed that all the power in the bargaining game between debtor and creditor lies with the latter. An earlier paper provided a game-theoretic basis for this contention. in that all the subgame-perfect equilibria of the game modeled have an...

Which is the more profitable way to sell a company: a public auction or an optimally structured negotiation with a smaller number of bidders? We show that under standard assumptions the public auction is always preferable, even if it forfeits all the seller's negotiating power, including the...

While the theoretical literature on non-cooperative legislative bargaining has grown voluminous, there is little empirical work attempting to test a key prediction in this literature: proposal power is valuable. This paper aims to fill this gap in the literature by investigating the role of...

We develop a dynamic bargaining model in which a leading country endogenously decides whether to sequentially negotiate free trade agreements with subsets of countries or engage in simultaneous multilateral bargaining with all countries at once. We show how the structure of coalition...