Arbitration outcomes are uncertain. When risk preferences are unobservable, players may make offers that attempt to extract the willingness of risk-averse bargaining partners to pay to avoid the uncertainties of arbitration. When such a “hard†offer is made to a risk-neutral bargaining...

We identify two features of final offer arbitration (FOA) which may impede settlement in a bargaining game where asymmetric information drives the failure to settle. First, under FOA the informed party has an incentive to conceal private information about the expected outcome in arbitration from...

As a result of Title IX, there has been a large increase in participation of women in college sports, while men's participation has remained roughly constant. We model the resource allocation decision across sports before and after Title IX was imposed. If the number of sports is held constant,...

We consider models of pretrial negotiations where both costly voluntary disclosure and costly mandatory discovery are possible. When the uninformed party makes the final offer (the screening game), mandatory discovery will be utilized if it is not very costly, but voluntary disclosure will not...

We extend the 1986 signaling model of Reinganum and Wilde by allowing for the possibility of negative expected value (NEV) suits. If filing costs are zero, the equilibrium consistent with the D1 refinement implies that settlement offers face a rejection rate of 100%. If filing costs are...

We analyze contingency fees in the Reinganum and Wilde (1986) signaling model of litigation. The effect of contingency fees on settlement depends on the details of the contingency fee contract and the nature of the informational asymmetry assumed in the model. Introducing bifurcated fee...

Final-offer arbitration in Major League Baseball provides an ideal setting for examining the empirical regularities that are associated with bargaining failure, since final offers, salaries, and player statistics, which provide the fundamental facts for the case, are all readily available. Using...