A number of authors have enriched Nash’s original bargaining problem through the introduction of an additional point, which we call a salient point. When the salient point is restricted to lie in the bargaining set, it is interpreted as a reference point, the outcome, perhaps, of a bargain from an earlier period. When restricted to lie outside the bargaining set, it is interpreted as a claim on...

I use the health care industry as a novel laboratory in which to study a firm’s strategic use of debt to enhance their bargaining power during negotiations with non-financial stakeholders. I show that reimbursement rates negotiated between a hospital and insurers for a specific procedure are higher when the hospital has more debt. I also show that this effect is stronger when hospitals have les...

Bargaining with Imperfect Enforcement* The game-theoretic bargaining literature insists on non-cooperative bargaining procedure but allows 'cooperative' implementation of agreements. The effect of this is to allow free-reign of bargaining power with no check upon it. In reality, courts cannot implement agreements costlessly, and parties often prefer to use 'non-cooperative' implementation. We p...

Solution uniqueness is an important property for a bargaining model. Rubinstein’s (1982) seminal 2-person alternating-offer bargaining game has a unique Subgame Perfect Equilibrium outcome. Is it possible to obtain uniqueness results in the much enlarged setting of multilateral bargaining with a characteristic function? In an exploratory effort, this paper investigates a model first proposed in...

To relax the assumption that licensees have no bargaining power, which is prevalent in the licensing literature, the Rubinstein bargaining model is integrated with a duopoly licensing model in this paper. The licensor always licenses the best technology regardless of whether the technology advances are negotiated or solely determined by the licensor. Further, royalties prove to be the only paym...

This paper investigates whether information about fairness types can be useful in lowering dispute costs and enhancing bargaining efficiency. An experiment was conducted in which subjects were first screened using a dictator game, with the allocations chosen used to separate participants into two types. Mutually anonymous pairs of subjects then bargained, with a dispute cost structure imposed. ...

This paper considers collective bargaining in a public sector institutional setting. The model demonstrates how budget constraints and hierarchical structure affect the bargaining outcome. A trade union bargains over wage and employment either with an output-maximizing bureau or the bureau’s sponsoring institution. The slope of the contract curve depends on the bargaining level because the budg...

This paper addresses the design of the machinery of collective bargaining from the perspective of microeconomic and macroeconomic flexibility. In the former context, somewhat greater attention is given over to enterprise flexibility than external adjustment. In the latter context, close attention is also paid to changes in collective bargaining along the dimensions of bargaining coverage, struc...

An n-person bargaining situation is two-sided when participants of bargaining are divided into two groups and their preferences over bargained outcomes are exactly opposite to each other. This is so when the issue on the bargaining table is represented by a one dimensional set and people’s preferences are monotonically increasing in one group and monotonically decreasing in the other group. In ...

The dominant theoretical model of plea bargaining predicts that, under conditions of full information and rational choice, criminal cases should uniformly be settled through plea bargaining. That prediction holds for innocent and guilty defendants alike. Because it is perfectly rational for innocent defendants to plead guilty, plea bargaining might be said to have an "innocence problem." Plea b...