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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]

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-0262.2006.00724.x Byline: Adib Bagh (1), Alejandro Jofre (2) Keywords: Better reply secure; discontinuous games; Nash equilibrium; payoff secure; reciprocal upper semicontinuity; weak reciprocal upper semicontinuity Abstract: A convex, compact, and possibly discontinuous better reply secure game has a Nash equilibrium. We introduce a very weak notion of continuity that can be used to establish that a game is better reply secure and we show that this notion of continuity is satisfied by a large class of games. Author Affiliation: (1)Dept. of Economics, University of California-Davis, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, U.S.A. (2)Dept. of Mathematical Engineering, Universidad de Chile, Blanco Encalada 2120, Santiago, Chile Article History: Manuscript received July, 2005; final revision received June, 2006.

An abstract economy's equilibria exist even without the assumption of the lower semi-continuity of constraint projections. This is possible through the graphical convergence of set-valued maps that also allow a more feasible abstract economic setting. Previous studies, such as those conducted by Borglin and Keiding in 1975, and most recently, Tan and Yuan in 1994, also derived results pointing to the existence of equilibria for abstract economies. However, their results all assumed the constraint map's lower semi-continuity.

We provide sufficient conditions for the economic value of a signal to be a convex function, either locally or globally, of the input required to produce the signal. We also provide conditions under which this input can be interpreted as a measure of the information contained in this signal. We demonstrate that, under certain conditions, information is a very peculiar good that can—globally—show increasing marginal utility. In contrast to the earlier approach used to obtain the classic results on the local lack of concavity of the value of information, our approach allows permits the investigation of concavity (or lack) of the function representing the value of information, without imposing any conditions of differentiability on this function. Our approach also allows us to show that the marginal value of information can be zero even at an informative signal. Finally, we discuss some of the difficulties that can arise in designing price discrimination schemes for selling signals with various levels of quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]