Arbitration, as an alternative to litigation for contract disputes, reduces costs and time. While it has frequently been thought of as a substitute to pretrial bargaining and litigation, in fact, parties may be able to reach a settlement privately while engaged in the arbitration process....

We consider a bargaining environment where there is asymmetric information regarding whether the two players have common or conflicting preferences. If the cost of strategic communication is independent of the state, then signaling is not expected to be effective. If the uninformed agent...

Bargaining is an essential activity in management and a central area of emphasis for economics. Game theorists have developed numerous theories regarding how institutional features of the negotiation affect the outcome. While empirical studies have validated these ideas, a substantial amount is...

A new explanation for the failure of plea bargaining is provided. It is shown that a retention agent (i.e. median voter) can use convictions at trial as a signal of the quality of a prosecutor. This encourages a public prosecutor to take cases to trial even when both social welfare and her...

Plea bargaining is the cornerstone of the U.S. criminal justice system and the bargaining in the shadow of the trial framework, where the plea reached is driven primarily by the expected sentence arising from a trial, is the convention for applied economists. Criminologists and legal scholars...