Ascending auctions offer agents the option to wait and see before deciding to drop out. We show that in contexts where as time proceeds agents get finer and finer estimates of their valuations, incentives to drop out at one's expected valuation are weak: it is optimal for agents to wait and see....

We consider bargaining problems in which parties have access to outside options, the size of the pie is commonly known and each party privately knows the realization of her outside option. We allow for correlations in the distributions of outside options. Parties have a veto right, which allows...

The presence of obstinate types in bargaining has been shown to alter dramatically the bargaining equilibrium strategies and outcomes. This paper shows that outside options may cancel out the effect of obstinacy in bargaining. When parties have access to stationary outside options, we show that...

This paper identifies a source of gradualism in bargaining andcontribution games. In the bargaining games we examine, each partycan opt out at any time, and the outside option outcome is assumed todepend on the offers made in the negotiation phase. Specifically, we assumethat (1) making a...

We study collective search processes in which members of a committee decide whether to accept the current proposal or continue searching. The acceptance decision is made according to majority rule. We study which members have more impact on the decision, as well as the degree of randomness of...

The coalitional Nash bargaining solution is defined to be the core allocation for which the product of players' payoffs is maximal. We consider a non-cooperative model with discounting in which one team may form and every player is randomly selected to make a proposal in every period. The grand...