This short paper demonstrates that the equilibrium payoffs of an alternating-offers bargaining game over a unit of surplus converge to equal division provided that the parties are allowed to bargain over all the surpluses generated by the "right" to be the first to make offers. The result...

We use a two-issue bargaining model with asymmetric information to study agent choice of how to structure bargaining. We uncover the settings in which different agenda structures are chosen in equilibrium, how the order in which issues are bargained over matters, and what impact the rules for...

Given n agents with von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions who wish to divide m commodities, consider the n-person noncooperative game with strategies consisting of concave, increasing von Neumann-Morgenstern utility functions, and whose outcomes are the relative utilitarian solution. It is...

Rational economic agents always engage in maximizing their payoffs. The endeavor in this paper is to show that when the parties involved in the bargaining process (game) have similar discount factors and when the number of periods of the game tends to infinity or very large, then the surplus is...

The US decision not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and the recent outcomes of the Bonn and Marrakech Conferences of the Parties drastically reduce the effectiveness of the Kyoto Protocol in controlling GHG emissions. The reason is not only the reduced emission abatement in the US, but also the...

This paper examines the welfare effects of third degree price discrimination by an intermediate good monopolist selling to downstream firms with bargaining power. One of the downstream firms (the "chain store") may have a greater ability than rivals to integrate backward into the supply of the...

Injurers often purchase the property of potential victims to avoid liability or to comply with regulations. This paper shows that injurers subject to cost-benefit standards could profit from buying out victims even if they attach no value to the victims' property. Because buyouts allow injurers...

One aspect of the well-known Nash (1950, 1953) bargaining framework that appears to have remained largely neglected is the possibility that the parties to the bargain may have the incentive to misrepresent their true outside options if agreement fails to occur. Yet it is precisely in situations...