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Research Summary: We examine the joint adoption of four employment restrictions that limit firm resource outflows—nondisclosure (NDA), non‐solicitation, non‐recruitment, and noncompete agreements—and their associations with value appropriation from employees. Using novel individual‐ and firm‐level survey data, we find that when firms adopt restrictions, they tend to adopt either all four restrictions or only an NDA. Adoption of all four restrictions is more likely when workers have access to valuable resources, noncompetes are more enforceable, and states adopt the inevitable disclosure doctrine. Employees with all four restrictions earn 5.4% less than employees with only NDAs, and this effect is driven by workers with low bargaining power. Analyses of earnings and a single restriction (e.g., only noncompetes) yield opposite results from those considering joint adoption, likely because of selection. Managerial Summary: Valuable firm resources are often embedded in employees. We study whether and when firms adopt four employment restrictions that could protect such resources—agreements not to disclose information, not to solicit clients or coworkers, and not to join or start a competitor—and examine the extent to which they are associated with value capture from employees. Using novel firm and worker‐level surveys, we find that firms mostly adopt either all four restrictions together, only an NDA, or use no restrictions. Workers are more likely to have all four restrictions when they have access to valuable resources, when noncompetes are more enforceable, and when states adopt the inevitable disclosure doctrine. Finally, all four restrictions are associated with 5.4% lower earnings on average relative to workers with only an NDA, driven by workers with low‐bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper estimates the causal effect of a targeted panic button program—implemented in two Turkish provinces between 2012 and 2016—on domestic violence. Difference-in-differences and synthetic control estimates suggest that the program notably increased physical violence against women both at the extensive and intensive margins. The likelihood of physical violence in the treated provinces increased by more than 5 percentage points relative to the control provinces, and the number of physical violence incidents increased by about 10 percent. The increase comes almost entirely from the increase in violence against less-educated women. Employment rates and economic independence indicators improved for women in the treated provinces, which suggests that the program empowered vulnerable women. However, male partners increased physical violence in response to female empowerment. The results are consistent with the male backlash theories and a class of non-cooperative models incorporating violence as a vehicle for enhancing males' bargaining power, but inconsistent with the models predicting that economic empowerment of women reduces violence by balancing bargaining power within the household. We also develop a method based on retrospective violence information to understand whether the increase is attributable to actual or self-reported violence and conclude that the estimates are entirely driven by the increase in actual violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research uses a behavioural game-theoretic paradigm to study the role of emotions in forming and preventing international conflict. We find that when two countries' strengths mismatch their resource, one of the two sides is motivated to initiate a conflict. However, national-dignity-related emotions can reduce this motivation. This is because countries with emotional populace are more likely to retaliate, thus becoming less susceptible to provocation. Meanwhile, these countries' leaders are more cautious in provoking other nations due to the fear of losing face from failed provocations. Consequently, long-term patriotic education can reduce international conflict by fostering these emotions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

(1) Background: Since the death of George Floyd, the social movement Black Lives Matter continues to dominate the American political psyche, not only advancing a public dialogue but also escalating the polarization of supported solutions for policing and systemic discrimination. (2) Methods: Using a qualitative context analysis approach, we assessed over 350 sources related to social justice literature and policy-relevant documents to identify key policy solutions supported by the American Black Lives Matter movement compared to the Blue Lives Matter movement. We applied Fearon's bargaining range of war model to analyze the extent to which the policy recommendations of these two opposing movements may overlap. The purpose was to identify and categorize agreement alternatives across various sectors. This research presents top policy solutions, assessing their bargaining ranges. (3) Results: 32 of the 36 top policy reform alternatives at the national level have sufficient bargaining ranges. This analysis indicates the importance of supporting various sectors like mental health/psychosocial policies and programs, which can (1) serve as a focal point of agreement between contending movements, and (2) decrease racial injustice through strategic bargaining. (4) Conclusions: In a divisively political landscape, it is crucial to identify starting points for negotiation among contending actors. Identifying bargaining opportunities can help seed a dialogue that may benefit all parties involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Evidence on the combined effects of threats and retaliations on bargainers' payoffs from actual marketplaces is scarce. We conduct a natural field experiment in a marketplace where buyers employ verbal threats to negotiate discounts, while sellers can covertly retaliate with fraudulent actions that may negatively affect buyers' payoffs. By varying the threat levels, we find that seller retaliations intensify as the threat level escalates, which more than offset any gains buyers make from negotiating discounts. Our finding highlights that in marketplaces where covert retaliations are feasible, the party employing threats in the bargaining process receives lower financial payoffs than in the absence of any threat, and the payoff declines with an increase in threat intensity. Our finding is particularly relevant for credence goods markets, where sellers may be inclined to intensify undertreatment in response to threats from buyers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies bargaining outcomes in economies in which agents may be able to impose outcomes that deviate from the relevant social norms but incur costs when they do so. It characterizes bargaining outcomes that are easiest for a society to sustain as part of a social norm that everybody will want to follow. Depending on technological assumptions, the approach yields the Nash bargaining solution, the Kalai–Smorodinsky solution, the equal monetary split, and other bargaining solutions. Set‐valued solution concepts are derived that are relevant if one is unable or unwilling to make specific technological assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent years have seen a growth in customized products and services. As a prerequisite for customization, private information on individual customers' quality preferences needs to be uncovered. Sellers can listen to customers about their stated or self-reported preferences through direct communication (e.g., conversation, survey). Alternatively, customer preferences can be inferred from their behavior when they are given the rights to self-design the quality. In this research we endogenize the viability of customization by investigating whether and when customers may reveal their stated/inferred preferences truthfully. We find that, for either preference-learning approach, customers would voice their preferences faithfully if and only if they are sufficiently heterogenous. Equilibrium preference revelation, and hence endogenous customization, tend to be sustained by intermediate seller bargaining power or nonextreme production/selling costs. We examine how the preference-learning approaches may differ in the endogenous feasibility of customization, equilibrium qualities, and the parties' expected payoffs. We show that giving up the design right need not always be harmful for the seller, and gaining it can make the buyers worse off, especially when fixed costs of customization are considered. This paper was accepted by Eric Anderson, marketing. Funding: This work was supported by a DAG grant offered by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do governments make concessions to some rebels but not others? We argue that the origins of rebel groups influence the bargaining process, and the government's willingness to make concessions in particular. Rebel groups inherit different resource endowments – community ties and military expertise – from pre-existing "parent" organizations. These resource endowments are visible to the government, and they provide critical information about the likely durability of the rebellion. We expect that rebel group origins facilitating these endowments are associated with the state offering concessions earlier in the conflict. Employing original data on rebel group origins, as well as information on government concessions during post-Cold War African conflicts, we find general support for our expectations, although not all types of parent organizations are equally beneficial to rebel groups when it comes to extracting concessions from the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The strategic importance of commitment in bargaining is widely acknowledged. Yet disentangling its role from key features of canonical models, such as proposal power and reputational concerns, is difficult. This paper introduces a model of bargaining with strategic commitment at its core. Following Schelling (1956, The American Economic Review , vol. 46, 281–306), commitment ability stems from the costly nature of concession and is endogenously determined by players' demands. Agreement is immediate for familiar bargainers, modelled via renegotiation-proofness. The unique prediction at the high concession cost limit provides a strategic foundation for the Kalai bargaining solution. Equilibria with delay feature a form of gradualism in demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the integration of metro and ride-hailing services is a promising way to handle the last-mile problem, the viability of long-term subsidies funded by municipalities with limited budgets is in doubt. We thus investigate two self-funded subsidy schemes: metro-lead subsidy scheme (MS) and ride-hailing platform-lead subsidy scheme (RS). To this end, an integrated system consisting of a metro operator and a ride-hailing platform is considered, where the participants have access to negotiation. A game-theoretic model is established to capture the interactions among self-interested stakeholders. The results across MS and RS show that bargaining behaviour is always effective in promoting traveller adoption of 'metro + ride-hailing', but cannot leave both operators better off due to the adverse effect on the ride-hailing platform. Also, bargaining behaviour enables the preferences of the operators for MS and RS to be aligned, which are sensitive to metro coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When both a buyer and a seller have private information about their valuations of the same object, they trade the object less efficiently. A better-informed agent than the buyer and the seller can facilitate trade more efficiently by advising them with the agent's information. However, the agent's interest affects the validity of the agent's advice and thus trade outcomes. When the agent's interest is to maximize the trade probability rather than the expected transaction price, the agent is more likely to share the agent's information with both the buyer and the seller. The information provided by the agent raises not only the trade probability but also the expected transaction price. Therefore, the attempt of the agent to raise the expected transaction price may fail, whereas the one to increase the trade probability succeeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Five classical and uncontroversial axioms—symmetry, weak Pareto optimality, restricted monotonicity, midpoint domination, and superadditivity—characterize a bargaining solution. It assigns to each player their midpoint, that is, the n -th share of their utopia point, and equally divides what remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider non-cooperative bargaining over a fixed surplus between two groups that may differ in size and the supermajority threshold they employ for within-group ratification. We find that total allocation to a group does not depend on group size and increases with the supermajority threshold. We use the Gini coefficient to study within-group inequality as an outcome of interest and find that inequality increases with group size and decreases with the supermajority threshold. Finally, we study delegation by concentrating the ability to influence proposals within a subset of group members. Delegation to a subgroup decreases the group's total allocation because non-delegates accept lower allocations. Inequality is higher if delegation is employed, and it is decreasing in the size of the delegate committee. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracy, as collective self-government by citizens, rests on citizens' capacity to bargain in good faith with those whose interests are not their own. Fair bargains that ensure adequate security and welfare rest on an implicit agreement: Each citizen recognizes that sectional interests (including our conceptions of ideal justice) will never be fully realized, but they are better off inside the bargain than outside of it, and will bargain again another day. Striking and revising civic bargains depend on the education of citizens: In aggregate, the citizenry must develop the requisite civic skills, political knowledge, and capacity for judgment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the logic of commitment problems to deliver insights about the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. In the canonical crisis bargaining framework, an anticipated power shift can cause bargaining failure. Bargaining breaks down in this context because a declining state reasons that fighting in the present from a strong position is preferable to negotiating in the future from a weaker position. I argue that this logic is relevant for understanding both Ukrainian and Russian decisionmaking in the lead-up to the invasion. The commitment problem logic also provides insight into the role of NATO in the conflict, highlighting flaws in existing arguments that the Russian invasion was "provoked" by NATO. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I introduce this issue's symposium on the Russo-Ukrainian War by giving a brief overview of the bargaining framework, which asks why states sometimes use war to resolve disputes despite common knowledge that fighting is wasteful. I describe two types of mechanism—costly war and costly peace—and briefly discuss each symposium contribution in relation to its proposed mechanism(s). I also discuss the advantages of the bargaining framework for identifying and ruling out potential causal mechanisms in historical cases and close with some suggestions for continued work in the modeling dialogue between theory and evidence in the study of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article develops a novel approach for studying the influence of supranational institutions in international cooperation. While earlier research tends to treat member states as a collective yielding influence on supranational institutions, we unpack this collective to explore differentiated supranational influence. To this end, the article makes three contributions. First, it develops a method for measuring differentiated supranational influence that makes it possible to identify which member states give ground when a supranational institution is influential. Second, it theorizes the sources of differentiated supranational influence, arguing that states are more likely to accommodate a supranational institution when they are more dependent on the resources of this institution. Third, it illustrates the usefulness of this approach empirically through an analysis of the influence of the European Commission in European Union bargaining. The analysis suggests that our approach can measure and explain differentiated supranational influence under conditions of both heightened crisis and everyday politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contexts as diverse as civil war interventions, alliances, and military coalitions, states often militarily assist protégés to counteract unfavorable power shifts. Existing theoretical work finds that such assistance mitigates commitment problems and reduces the probability of war. We develop a model that captures this but also includes information asymmetries. In many cases, overcoming the commitment problem encourages the protégé to take greater risks in bargaining, thereby increasing the probability of war due to incomplete information. Using mechanism design, we show that in some cases, no feasible transfer can reduce the probability of war to zero. More broadly, our results indicate that encouraging policymakers to further expand military assistance can backfire despite empirical relationships that may appear otherwise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared to linear tariffs, two-part tariffs are generally perceived as being more efficient since double marginalization is avoided. We investigate the efficiency of two-part tariffs vs. linear tariffs when a vertically integrated firm sells its input also to an independent downstream firm selling a differentiated substitute product. We find that a linear tariff can generate higher consumer surplus and overall welfare than a two-part tariff when the independent downstream firm is rather powerful in negotiating the contract terms, and downstream competition is in prices (Bertrand competition). In that case, the integrated firm makes more profits under a linear tariff than under a two-part tariff. In contrast, under downstream Cournot competition two-part tariffs are always welfare-superior. Under linear demand, we find that, irrespective of the mode of downstream competition and the distribution of bargaining power, the preferred contract type of the integrated firm is always welfare-superior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

States often use market access as a bargaining chip in international politics. A state that requires simultaneous compliance in multiple issue areas before granting market access maximizes incentives to comply but also makes them brittle – any targeted states that cannot comply in one issue area have no incentive to comply in any. More generally, programs of economic coercion can achieve at most two of the following three objectives: 1) secure a broad coalition of domestic political support, 2) the association of meaningful trade value with each policy issue, and 3) assurance that enforcing one political issue will not reduce the target's incentives to comply with conditionality on others. Characteristics of the program's domestic constituency, of the issues themselves, and of the international economy are key determinants of how the state prioritizes the three objectives. The trilemma explains the number and types of issues that can be linked to economic value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International relations research suggests that powerful states can use both arms transfers and alliance commitments to improve the security of friendly states. This work largely assumes these different strategies are either complementary or straightforward substitutes for one another. Here, I consider the ways in which arms sales and alignment interact, highlighting the conditions under which arms transfers can either undermine or enhance the credibility of extended deterrent threats. I study a formal model in which a patron can increase a client's defense capabilities through arms transfers, which in turn generate audience costs if the patron fails to defend that client in a conflict. The model yields several important results. Under different conditions arms transfers can either entrap a patron in a war it hoped to avoid or allow it to escape a war it would otherwise have joined. But most strikingly, arms sales can make extended deterrent threats less credible by decreasing the patron's marginal contribution to a joint military effort. The model shows that under some conditions arms transfers can actually cause deterrence failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Raiffa's solution to the bargaining problem, outlined in Luce and Raiffa (1957) , is the point where the negotiation curve - a sequence of points that constitute step-by-step improvements from the status quo in the feasible payoff space - meets (possibly in the limit) the efficient boundary of the feasible region. A bargaining model with interim agreements yields a negotiation curve in equilibrium (in the spirit of Raiffa), and as the bargaining frictions disappear, the Raiffa path of payoffs converges to the Nash solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When states fight wars, they choose between multiple military strategies, e.g. whether to place boots on the ground or restrict efforts to an air campaign. We modify the standard crisis bargaining model to account for this by endogenizing a state's war strategy. Intuitively, states choose the more powerful strategy when the additional strength gained covers the additional costs of doing so. However, there is a counterintuitive second-order consequence of this. When stronger campaigns are expensive but still credible, states are more likely to reach a negotiated settlement to avoid the corresponding high costs. As the cost of the more powerful option increases, states substitute their actions with cheaper but weaker alternatives. Because of these lower costs, states become less likely to reach a settlement. In some cases, both parties may be worse off as a result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose ― Most global economies are dealing with the issue of skill bias. In developing and underdeveloped countries, skill bias poses a problem by preventing the educated from participating in the economy's production function, especially in the long run. This paper expands on the skill-wage relationship and investigates this issue in the case of Iran from 1981 to 2021. Methods- Applying Impulse Responses from VECM and the Structural VAR model separates the relationship between skill and wage into short- and long-term effects. The structural wage model was estimated using the structural vector auto-regression model. Findings ― The results show that skill played a significant role in wage determination only for three periods in the short run, and the effect was neutral in the long run. This means that skill accumulation through advancement in graduate and postgraduate study is unlikely to increase wages in the long run. Implication ― According to the findings, skill bias implies that education attainment in the Iranian labour market can only improve wages to a minimum extent. This also proves that factors other than education determine wage growth in the economy. Originality ― The skill-wage relationship has not been a focus of studies in education outcome fields. Moreover, in the case of Iran, this investigation is novel, and there is a lack of studies on the relationship between compensation and skill.

The authors argue that paid providers of care services in the United States (in health, education, and social service industries) are less able than providers of business services to capture value-added or to extract rents because limited consumer sovereignty, incomplete information regarding quality, and large positive externalities reduce their relative market power. In addition, many care jobs enforce normative responsibility for others and require specific skills that limit cross-industry mobility. Analysis of Current Population Survey data for 2014 to 2019 reveals significant pay penalties in care services relative to business services, controlling for factors such as gender, education, occupation, and public or private employment. Women's concentration in care services explains a significant proportion of the gender wage gap and raises the possibility of significant potential benefits from industry-level bargaining strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines whether individuals can accurately predict trust and trustworthiness in others based on their appearance. Using photos and decisions from previous experimental trust games, subjects were asked to view the photos and guess the levels of trust and trustworthiness of the individuals depicted. The results show that subjects had little ability to accurately guess the trust and trustworthiness behavior of others. There is significant heterogeneity in the accuracy of guesses, and errors in guesses are systematically related to the observable characteristics of the photos. Subjects' guesses appear to be influenced by stereotypes based on the features seen in the photos, such as gender, skin color, or attractiveness. These findings suggest that individuals' beliefs that they can infer trust and trustworthiness from appearance are unfounded, and that efforts to reduce the impact of stereotypes on inferred trustworthiness may improve the efficiency of trust-based interactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, truck rates for perishable food, the per‐mile rate charged for trucking services to move perishable food from farms to stores, rose substantially in the post‐COVID‐19 pandemic era. We argue that rising truck rates is a signal of a broader shortage of truckers, but the connection between labor shortages, rising truck rates, and a lack of trucking services has yet to be established empirically. In this paper, we develop an empirical examination based on an equilibrium job search, matching, and bargaining framework in which we estimate the role of labor shortages in accelerating driver‐wage growth, and truck rates for agricultural products. We estimate the model by combining US Bureau of Census Current Population Survey data on truck driver wages with USDA‐Agricultural Marketing Service Service data on truck rates to establish the linkage between trucker supply and the demand for trucking services. We find that the COVID‐19 pandemic was responsible for a rise in for‐hire trucker wages of some 38%$38\%$, a rise in average truck rates of nearly 50%$50\%$ and that the gap between trucker‐job openings and successful matches explains a significant, but small, rise in truck rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Job security has always been a paramount concern for the trade union movement. This article explores the ways that unions used collective bargaining to gain a measure of job security for their members in the face of deindustrialization as unionized factories in North America began to close in large numbers after the 1970s. These new measures included advance notice, severance pay, plant closing moratoria, restrictions placed on plant movements, transfer rights, and expanding the scope of collective 'social' bargaining to cover training and adjustment. In some sectors, such as automotive, collective bargaining has also been extended into areas normally left to management. The price was often high. Eventually some unions, notably the Canadian Auto Workers (established 1985; part of Unifor after 2013), prioritized winning new capital investments and product lines for unionized plants in their negotiations, though often at the cost of jobs, wage freezes or reductions, and other concessions. By focusing upon auto sector deindustrialization in Canada since the 1980s, we draw lessons from more recent union bargaining strategies, and how they constitute an important element of worker responses to industrial job loss and manufacturing closure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bargaining with suppliers is a key Purchasing and Supply Management (PSM) activity but there is considerable ambiguity over what bargaining entails and the concept currently lacks a systematic treatment, despite its significant interest to PSM professionals. The literature shows that bargaining can be seen as an adversarial approach to negotiation (in contrast to more integrative/collaborative ones) and also the back-and-forth discussion over price and other variables between buying and supplying organisations to reach an agreement. In addition, many will move between fundamentally distributive and integrative approaches as the discussions play out. A systematic literature review of the Scopus, ProQuest, ScienceDirect, JSTOR and Web of Science databases was undertaken to address this gap, identifying 427 relevant journal papers that were systematically analysed. First, descriptive techniques identified the trajectory of published papers, methods, theories and their industrial context. Second, content analysis identified the key constructs and associated operational measures/variables of bargaining. Third, the constructs have then been ordered temporally and by areas of location (organisational/departmental and individual levels) to generate a model and inform a series of practice-based recommendations at different stages of the bargaining process. The findings will allow future researchers to use the constructs either directly in developing focused hypotheses to test relationships or as a basis for refinement and extension in cumulative theory building and testing. In addition, a series of focused research gaps have been identified, such as addressing the current contradictory findings of the effect of purchasing volume or organisational size on bargaining power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing literature on the politics of work–family reconciliation policies focuses primarily on women and their policy preferences as the main driver of recent policy expansions. But what do we know about male preferences? This article explores this question in an innovative way by integrating insights from economic and sociological studies of division of labor and bargaining within the household. It investigates the link between women's relative resources within the household and their male partners' preferences for different types of reconciliation policies. Drawing on regression analysis of nineteen OECD countries using the International Social Survey Program data (Family and Changing Gender Roles IV), we find that: (1) men in dual-earner households, men in college-educated educational homogamy, and men in educational hypogamy (the woman is better educated) are more likely to support reconciliation policies; and (2) women's earnings and education have different effects on men's preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negotiation is the core of diplomacy, and the various elements and aspects of diplomatic practice closely relate to the organization and conduct of negotiations. This article discusses the impact of diplomatic essentials – diplomacy’s basic features stemming from its idea, spirit, culture, traditions, and methods – on negotiating in diplomatic settings. Diplomats need to use these essentials to negotiate effectively. Therefore, in diplomacy, to be a good negotiator, one needs to be a good diplomat. By analyzing the negotiation implications of diplomatic representation, aspiration, groundwork, timing, intercourse, code of conduct, and language, I argue that the essential features of international diplomacy can be seen as important assets of the strategic management of diplomatic negotiation. In other words, diplomatic actors can have a significant impact on negotiation effectiveness by using and managing these seven diplomatic essentials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been considerable interest in studying the effect of female labor market outcomes on intrahousehold bargaining. This paper examines the effects of local labor market opportunities in India on a variety of female bargaining characteristics, including domestic violence and intrahousehold discussion of important issues. Specifically, I utilize district-level data on employment in various occupations to calculate an employment shift-share index that proxies gender-specific labor demand. I find that improvements in labor market conditions for women lead to a decrease in perceptions of domestic violence, whereas improvements in predicted demand for male employment have little or negative effects on women's household bargaining power. When disaggregated by indicators of initial bargaining power, women that have lower levels of initial bargaining power either see no effect on bargaining or experience a backlash effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A burgeoning literature in labor economics is focused on modeling employer labor market power, generally finding nontrivial estimates of monopsony power. A smaller literature also simultaneously incorporates product market power. Deb, Eeckhout, Patel, and Warren (2024) is an example of applying an oligopoly‐oligopsony model to the U.S. labor market, arguing for important effects on wage levels and inequality from rising market power. I support combining IO and labor as a fruitful way of studying wages and business dynamism, but argue for looking more broadly at (i) differential degrees of employer power in labor and product markets; (ii) investigating the dynamic sources of markups (e.g., through innovation), and (iii) considering wage bargaining models, not just wage posting models, which have some starkly different implications for wage setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Political leaders value public demonstrations of support from foreign leaders and frequently make concessions in order to obtain them. We model the bargaining dynamics surrounding these exchanges and their impact on the recipient leader's political survival, with a focus on top-level diplomatic visits as a means of signaling international support. Our model addresses two interrelated questions; first, we consider how symbolic displays of support from one leader to another can be informative even when they are "purchased" with concessions, and second, we derive the equilibrium price and political impact of a visit under different bargaining protocols. The incentive to make a concession in exchange for a visit generally undermines a visit's signaling value. We identify a diplomatic resource curse, where the existence of opportunities for diplomatic exchange can force leaders into accepting visit-for-concession deals that leave them worse off than if they were diplomatically isolated. Visits never occur when negotiations are fully transparent. Mutually beneficial quid pro quo diplomacy requires opacity in negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the welfare impact of expanding the negotiation agenda of an international agreement between asymmetric countries (e.g., including specific negotiations over environmental regulations or labor standards in a conventional trade agreement) and demonstrates why such proposed expansions are contentious. A main result is that agenda expansions that provide more bargaining flexibility will increase the efficiency of the agreement but can result in a less equitable agreement that hurts the country that is at a bargaining disadvantage. Similarly, we demonstrate that decreases in bargaining game asymmetry can also make the disadvantaged country worse‐off even as it increases global welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce loss aversion in an infinite‐horizon, alternating‐offers model. When outside options serve as reference points, the equilibrium of our model follows that of the standard Rubinstein bargaining model (i.e., outside options do not affect the equilibrium unless they are binding). However, when reference points are given by the resources that players contribute to the pie, the bargaining outcome changes such that a player's share increases in her contribution. We test our model's predictions in the laboratory. As predicted, only binding outside options affect the division of the pie. Data also show that contributions matter for bargaining outcomes when they are activated as reference points, but not quite as predicted by our theory. Proposers gain a higher share of the pie only when they have contributed a higher share than the opponent has. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose a process model that examines the antecedents and consequences of bargaining concession rates with managerially relevant constructs grounded in social psychology to predict negotiation outcomes in a sales setting involving multiple issues. The situational factors of relative power, constituent's monitoring, time pressure; and dispositional factors of bargainer's personality toughness and risk-taking propensity are integrated to test the associated set of hypotheses. Our novel approach employs a fractional factorial design experiment to test the predictions of our NIMBuS solution. The results of our sophisticated bargaining experiment support our model and hypotheses and add to the literature for empirical generalizability. We find in our integrated test that concession rates tend to be lower when bargainers are in a higher relative power position, are under lower time pressure, have higher personality-toughness, or have a higher risk-taking propensity. The underpinning of economic models asserting the importance of discount rates for concession-making does not hold. Our results indicate that the cost-prohibitive mechanism of organizational monitoring of salespeople may not be needed. Importantly, under asymmetric bargaining power situations, our model predicts actual outcomes better than the Nash solution. The critical importance of integrating social-psychological factors to understand the bargaining process and improve predicted outcomes is underscored. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Retailers routinely present a posted or sale price together with a higher advertised reference price, in an effort to evoke a perception of the discount the consumer is receiving. However, if prices can be negotiated, what impact does this initial perceived discount (IPD) have on the ultimate discount, demand, and revenue? With data from consumers of a large durable goods retailer, in a natural decision-making environment, this study provides evidence that a greater IPD is associated with smaller negotiated discounts. Then, a lab experiment involving negotiation and purchase decisions for multiple products, with randomly assigned values of the IPD, establishes that a $1 increase in IPD lowers the negotiated discount by 5.7 cents. Furthermore, 55% of this decrease can be attributed to reduction in the participants' likelihood to initiate a negotiation. Under bargaining, almost one-third of the increase in revenue from a higher IPD stems from an increase in the negotiated price, which is unlike fixed pricing, in which setting an increase in IPD affects revenue only through changes in demand. Finally, the optimal advertised reference prices a seller would post under bargaining and fixed pricing are similar, but the benefit from posting this price is significantly higher under bargaining. These findings in turn have implications for researchers, retailers, consumers and policy makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background Despite the relaxation of fertility restrictions, China’s birth rate continues to decline. The Universal Two-Child Policy encourages couples to consider having a second child, often leading to a bargaining process between spouses with differing preferences. Additionally, the skewed sex ratio has increased Chinese women’s bargaining power, highlighting the importance of analyzing fertility decisions through marital bargaining. Methods This paper investigates second-child fertility decisions using data from the 2018 China Family Panel Studies and employs Ordinary Least Squares regression. The study examines assortative matching based on fertility preferences and uses the 2020 provincial-level sex ratio for individuals aged 20–39 as a proxy for women’s bargaining power in the marriage market. Results The study shows that achieving consensus on having a second child requires cooperation between spouses, particularly when their fertility preferences differ. The study also reveals that marriage matching is not random; individuals are more likely to partner with those who share the same second-child preference. Additionally, women with greater bargaining power positively influence their husbands’ desired family size, a correlation not observed in males. Conclusion The study concludes that second-child fertility decisions in China are significantly influenced by marital bargaining and the increased bargaining power of women due to the skewed sex ratio. Cooperation between spouses with differing fertility preferences is crucial for reaching a consensus on having a second child.