Complex business contracts are notoriously difficult to write and read. Certainly, when litigation arises, courts scarcely have an easy time interpreting them. Indeed, contracts don't look at all as though they are written to tell a court what the parties want. Why can't smart, well-motivated...

We propose a model of gradual bargaining in the spirit of the Nash axiomatic theory. In this model the underlying set of payoff opportunities expands continuously with time. Unlike Nash's solution that predicts a single agreement for each bargaining problem, our solution yields a continuous path...

Empirical researchers have begun to explore the influence of apologies on litigant decision making. This research has found that the effects of apologies on decision making are complex, but that apologies generally influence claimants' perceptions, judgments, and decisions in ways that are...

This article shows how the principles of modern bargaining theory can help develop a better understanding of contractual terms such as royalties between copyright holders and users such as between an artist and a recording company (or between an author and a publisher). We develop the main...

Recent research has shown that large companies select New York law and New York courts to govern disputes under commercial contracts. Because these parties make choice-of-law and forum selection decisions before conflicts arise, there is reason to believe that their preference for New York...

Walton and McKersie's Behavioral Theory of Labor Negotiation sought to provide a descriptive theory of the process by which union and management negotiators reached settlements. Their paper drew on existing psychology, behavioral decision theory, and game theory. The basic psychological model of...

In two experiments we studied the relation between dependency and deception in the ultimatum bargaining game. Participants could deceive the other player about the value of the chips they bargained over. Dependency was manipulated by manipulating the consequences of rejecting a proposal for both...

Central to recent debates about international cooperation has been the contention that if states seek relative gains, cooperation becomes more difficult. To help revive and redirect the debate, we provide a general treatment of the relative-gains argument in the simplest possible formal terms....

In this article we investigate the behavior and motives of people in a positive and negative valence Ultimatum Bargaining Game (UBG). In this last game the allocator and recipient both have the same initial endowment and bargain about how to divide a certain loss. In Experiment 1 we show by...