Decision theory includes arbitration, bargaining and game theory, whose relationships to each other are not well-understood. This paper introduces a particular weighted arbitration operator and applies it to King Solomon’s dilemma and Nash’s original bargaining problem. These applications allow a more meaningful comparison of the three theories and show that arbitration provides a more natural,...

Collective bargaining and dispute resolution mechanisms facilitate coordination. Coordination is increasingly seen as an influential determinant of labor market and macroeconomic performance. This paper provides a systematic review of the relevant literature with a specific focus on the role that collective bargaining plays in shaping macroeconomic performance. We focus on comparative studies o...

One of the reforms proposed for Ontario’s broader public sector by the Drummond Report is the establishment of centralized bargaining structures. As Chaykowski and Hickey have argued, such a reform “must consider whether, how, and in what context, alternative bargaining structures and enhanced coordination could yield outcomes which promote efficiencies and improve value.” In this regard, the t...

We posit that parties assess bargaining outcomes not in absolute terms but in relative terms vis a vis reference points and we assume that reference points are a ected by prior o ers. In a simple bargaining model, we illustrate how such evolving preferences may be responsible for gradualism and delay in bargaining. We observe that the resulting ine ciency may not vanish even in the limit as the...

This article intends to apply the Nash Bargaining solution to wage setting in a vertically differentiated oligopoly and to study its welfare effects. The market outcome crucially depends on the bargaining power attributed to the agents. I show that the resulting wage bargaining structure is likely to lead to another source of distortion that adds to the classical one derived by oligopoly pricin...

Abstract In the 1950s, the Nobel Prize winner John F. Nash has shown that under certain conditions, the best solution to the bargaining problem is when the product of the (increase in) utilities is the largest. Nash’s derivation assumed that we are looking for strategies that assign a single situation to each bargaining situation. In this paper, we propose a simplified derivation of Nash bargai...

We apply the aggregation property of Identical Shape Harmonic Absolute Risk Aversion (ISHARA) utility functions to analyze the comparative statics properties of a bargaining model with uncertainty. We identify sufficient and necessary conditions under which an increase in one’s degree of risk aversion benefits/hurts one’s opponent. We apply our model to analyze the problems of bargaining over i...

This study examines the behavior of simple n-person bargaining problems under pre-donations where the Kalai-Smorodinsky (KS) solution is operant. Pre-donations are a unilateral commitment to transfer a portion of one’s utility to someone else, and are used to distort the bargaining set and thereby influence the bargaining solution. In equilibrium, these pre-donations are Pareto-improving over t...

We study repeated legislative bargaining in an assembly that chooses its bargaining rules endogenously, and whose members face an election after each legislative term. An agenda protocol or bargaining rule assigns to each legislator a probability of being recognized to make a policy proposal in the assembly. We predict that the agenda protocol chosen in equilibrium disproportionately favors mor...

The issue of power in distribution channels remains a topic of interest among both practitioners and researchers of marketing. This interest has, no doubt, been fueled by the growing power of retailers and the emergence of retail powerhouses such as Walmart. Power, in a distribution channels context, is often de…ned as the ability to appropriate a larger share of the total channel surplus. In a...