BACKGROUND Many of public hospitals in Japan have had a deficit for a long time. Japanese local governments have been encouraging public hospitals to use group purchasing of drugs to benefit from the economies of scale, and increase their bargaining power for obtaining discounts in drug purchasing, thus improving their financial situation. In this study, we empirically investigate whether or no...

One of the recurring topics in retailing is the power shift in the supply channel toward the retailers. Several studies focus on the reasons for the power shift rather than highlighting the consequences for the retailer-manufacturer relationship. Despite a considerable amount of literature about gender, the intersection of power and gender is seldom challenged. In this paper, we combine both re...

The communication of participants to identify an acceptable bargaining outcome in the Nash bargaining game is all about fairness norms. Participants introduce fairness norms which yield a better outcome for themselves in order to convince the other participant of their bargaining proposal. Typically, these fairness norms are in line with theoretical predictions, which support a wide variety of ...

The paper introduces an axiomatic characterization of a solution to bargaining problems. The bargaining problems addressed are specified by: (a) the preference relations of the bargaining parties (b) resources that are the subject of bargaining, and (c) a pre-specified disagreement bundle for each party that would result in case bargaining fails. The approach is ordinal in that parties’ prefere...

The paper analyses recurring group decision making problems under uncertainty regarding future preferences of the actors involved, problems faced by many real world committees. The need for continuity in policy making implies that past decisions play an important role in determining subsequent ones, creating dynamic procedural linkages. In this context we compare two bargaining protocols: i) th...