We use a human-subjects experiment to investigate how bargaining outcomes are affected by changes in bargainers’ disagreement payoffs. Subjects bargain against changing opponents, with randomly drawn asymmetric disagreement outcomes that vary over plays of the game, and with complete...

Game theorists typically assume that changing a game's payoff levels - by adding the same constant to, or subtracting it from, all payoffs - should not affect behavior. While this invariance is an implication of the theory when payoffs mirror expected utilities, it is an empirical question when...