Can banks exploit the political economy to generate revenue? If bank creditors (local depositors) are voters, the bank's capital structure can act as a tool to impact the electorate and thus bail-outs by changing the relative group size of voters who favor as opposed to object bailouts.As the...

Mediator proposals can accelerate agreement and increase welfare even if the mediator is entirely uninformed. We demonstrate this by adding random mediation to the Cramton (1992) bargaining model. Mediation increases welfare by pooling types, which reduces signaling costs. When mediation is...

Cutting out the intermediary and selling directly to consumers is an increasingly common strategy by manufacturers in many industries. We develop a structural model of vertical relations where manufacturers both bargain with retailers over wholesale prices and sell their products directly to...

Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a "precise" first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a "round" first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the "precise first offer" (PFO) effect...

This paper examines the impact of renegotiations on contract renewals. Using an original dataset of procurement contracts in the French car park sector, we show that there exists an optimal level of renegotiations that positively impacts the probability of renewing a contract with the same...

The composition of governing coalitions does not always reflect the relative sizes of the coalition members, but research has not been able to fully reconcile why. We propose that political parties with more (re-elected) incumbent representatives fare better in coalitional bargaining. To...

We develop a tractable model of strategic debt renegotiation in which businesses are sequentially interconnected through their liabilities. This financing structure, which we refer to as a debt chain, gives rise to externalities as a lender’s willingness to provide concessions to his...

In this paper we examine the effects of limited liability on mortgage dynamics. While the literature has focused on default rates, renegotiation, or loan rates individually, we study them together as equilibrium outcomes of the strategic interaction between lenders and borrowers. We present a...