On bargaining partner selection when communication is restricted

This paper analyzes the optimal selection of a bargaining partner when communication among players is restricted by an exogenously given graph. If players are equally patient, bargaining agreements are immune to players' locations, and the selection of a bargaining partner is not an issue. In contrast, when players differ in their discount factors, both location and impatience matter for bilateral agreements and partner selection becomes an issue. We show that selecting the most impatient neighbor is an equilibrium strategy whenever two players having a common neighbor share their most impatient neighbor. This condition is always satisfied by stratified graphs with no more than three strata. In the absence of this condition, cyclically-stratified graphs with no more than three strata also admit this equilibrium selection rule. Received: November 2000/Final version: January 2002     

Relative impatience determines preference between contract bargaining and repeated bargaining

In this paper we consider the effect of the `impatience ratio' I (of the worker discount factor to the firm discount factor) on the preferences of the players between two bargaining schemes in an asymmetric information wage bargaining context. The firm has private information about the worker's value and the worker makes wage demands. In the contact bargaining scheme, a wage demand which is accepted in one period is binding for all future periods (and hence the bargaining ends after acceptance of a wage demand). In the repeated bargaining scheme, the parties continue to bargain irrespective of whether the worker has been hired or not, and any accepted wage demand is only valid for the period in which it was accepted. We establish the following results under the assumption that the worker's value is uniformly distributed on an interval: When the firm is more patient than the worker (I<1) both parties prefer contract bargaining, and when the worker is more patient than the firm (I >1) both prefer repeated bargaining. For any value of I, the preferred type of bargaining gives the lower unemployment.  The work of Bae has already shown that when players are equally patient (I=1) the players are indifferent between the two schemes, regardless of the distribution of the worker's value. This paper shows that Bae's indifference result (Bae, 1991) cannot be extended to unequally patient players. Received: December 1996/Final version: October 1998     

Bargaining sets in cooperative games with limited communication

Given a connected undirected graph ϕ with vertex set N, cooperative games (N, v) are considered in which players can cooperate only when the corresponding vertices form a connected subgraph in the graph ϕ. For such games, two generalizations of the bargaining set M ₁ ⁱ , which was introduced by Aumann and Maschler, are investigated.     

Sequential share bargaining

This paper presents a new extension of the Rubinstein-St?hl bargaining model to the case with n players, called sequential share bargaining. The bargaining protocol is natural and has as its main feature that the players’ shares in the surplus are determined sequentially rather than simultaneously. The protocol also assumes orderly voting, a restriction on the order in which players respond to a proposal. The bargaining protocol requires unanimous agreement for proposals to be implemented. Unlike all existing bargaining protocols with unanimous agreement, the resulting game has unique subgame perfect equilibrium utilities for any value of the discount factor. The result builds on the analysis of so-called one-dimensional bargaining problems. We show that also one-dimensional bargaining problems have unique subgame perfect equilibrium utilities for any value of the discount factor.     

Coalitions and payoffs in three‐person sequential games: Initial tests of two formal models

In this paper we develop two formal models predicting coalitions and payoffs among rank striving players in a sequential three‐person game. We test the models’ predictions with data from a laboratory study of eleven male triads. Each triad plays a sequence of games; in each game a two‐person coalition forms and divides the coalition's point value between the two coalition partners. Participants know that the sequence of games will end without warning at a randomly chosen time; at the sequence's end each player's monetary payoff is a linear function of the rank of his accumulated point score, relative to those of the other members of his triad. The complexity of this situation prevents players and analysts from representing it as a single game; thus they are unable to use n‐person game theory to identify optimal strategies. Consequently, we assume that players, unable to develop strategies that are demonstrably optimal in the long run, adopt certain bargaining heuristics and surrogate short run objectives.

The two models follow the same basic outline; they differ, however, in the planning horizon they assume players to use. Proceeding from a priori assumptions concerning each player's decision calculus and the bargaining process, the two models state the probability that each coalition forms and predict the point divisions in the winning coalition. The laboratory data provide consistently strong support for the predictions of both models.     

Kalai-Smorodinsky Bargaining Solution Equilibria

Multicriteria games describe strategic interactions in which players, having more than one criterion to take into account, don’t have an a-priori opinion on the relative importance of all these criteria. Roemer (Econ. Bull. 3:1–13, 2005) introduces an organizational interpretation of the concept of equilibrium: each player can be viewed as running a bargaining game among criteria. In this paper, we analyze the bargaining problem within each player by considering the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution (see Kalai and Smorodinsky in Econometrica 43:513–518, 1975). We provide existence results for the so called Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution equilibria for a general class of disagreement points which properly includes the one considered by Roemer (Econ. Bull. 3:1–13, 2005). Moreover we look at the refinement power of this equilibrium concept and show that it is an effective selection device even when combined with classical refinement concepts based on stability with respect to perturbations; in particular, we consider the extension to multicriteria games of the Selten’s trembling hand perfect equilibrium concept (see Selten in Int. J. Game Theory 4:25–55, 1975) and prove that perfect Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution equilibria exist and properly refine both the perfect equilibria and the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution equilibria.     

Independent mistakes in large games

Economic models usually assume that agents play precise best responses to others' actions. It is sometimes argued that this is a good approximation when there are many agents in the game, because if their mistakes are independent, aggregate uncertainty is small. We study a class of games in which players' payoffs depend solely on their individual actions and on the aggregate of all players' actions. We investigate whether their equilibria are affected by mistakes when the number of players becomes large. Indeed, in generic games with continuous payoff functions, independent mistakes wash out in the limit. This may not be the case if payoffs are discontinuous. As a counter-example we present the n players Nash bargaining game, as well as a large class of “free-rider games.” Received: November 1997/Final version: December 1999     

The polynomial hierarchy and a simple model for competitive analysis

The multi-level linear programs of Candler, Norton and Townsley are a simple class of sequenced-move games, in which players are restricted in their moves only by common linear constraints, and each seeks to optimize a fixed linear criterion function in his/her own continuous variables and those of other players. All data of the game and earlier moves are known to a player when he/she is to move. The one-player case is just linear programming.We show that questions concerning only the value of these games exhibit complexity which goes up all levels of the polynomial hierarchy and appears to increase with the number of players.For three players, the games allow reduction of the ₂ and ₂ levels of the hierarchy. These levels essentially include computations done with branch-and-bound, in which one is given an oracle which can instantaneously solve NP-complete problems (e.g., integer linear programs). More generally, games with (p + 1) players allow reductions of _p and _p in the hierarchy.An easy corollary of these results is that value questions for two-player (bi-level) games of this type is NP-hard.The author's work has been supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and the Institut fur Okonometrie und Operations Research of the University of Bonn, Federal Republic of Germany; grant ECS8001763 of the National Science Foundation, USA; and a grant from the Georgia Tech Foundation.     

A generalization of the Egalitarian and the Kalai–Smorodinsky bargaining solutions

We characterize the class of weakly efficient n-person bargaining solutions that solely depend on the ratios of the players’ ideal payoffs. In the case of at least three players the ratio between the solution payoffs of any two players is a power of the ratio between their ideal payoffs. As special cases this class contains the Egalitarian and the Kalai–Smorodinsky bargaining solutions, which can be pinned down by imposing additional axioms.     

Equilibrium computation of the Hart and Mas-Colell bargaining model

The 8-th problem raised by [Hart, S., Mas-Colell, A., 2010. Bargaining and cooperation in strategic form games. Journal of the European Economics Association 8 (1), 7–33], is solved. To be specific, I show that the set of SP equilibria can be determined by a finite number of systems of linear inequalities, which are efficiently solvable when there are two players. This is more or less surprising because the Hart and Mas-Colell bargaining model and the SP equilibrium both seem to be rather complicated, and it is well known that an arbitrary Nash equilibrium is hard to compute, even when there are only two players. Using this algorithm, it is shown that players of Prisoners’ Dilemma can cooperate to some extent in the Hart and Mas-Colell bargaining, and full cooperation is attainable as ρ$\rho$, a parameter of this model, approaches to 1. Quantitative efficiency, i.e. price of anarchy, is also analyzed.     

Regular population monotonic allocation schemes

The paper introduces a refinement of the notion of population monotonic allocation scheme, called regular population monotonic allocation scheme (regularpmas). This refinement is based on economic situations in which players may have to select new partners from a set of potential players and in which there exist certain capacity constraints. A sufficient condition for the existence of a regularpmas is given. For the class of games with regularpmas, we prove that the core coincides with the Davis and Maschler and the Mas-Colell bargaining sets.     

Nonsmooth semipermeable barriers, Isaacs’ equation, and application to a differential game with one target and two players

We study the target problem which is a differential game where one of the players aims at reaching a target while the other player aims at avoiding this target forever. We characterize the victory domains of the players by means of geometric conditions and prove that the boundary of the victory domains is a nonsmooth semipermeable surface, i.e., is a solution (in a weak sense) of the Isaacs equation: sup _u inf _v 〈f (x, u, v),p〉 = 0, wheref is the dynamic of the system,u andv are the respective controls of the players, andp is a normal to the boundary of the victory domains at the pointx.     

Z-cyclic triplewhist tournaments—The noncompatible case,part I

Two odd primes odd, are said to be noncompatible if b₁ ≠ b₂. For all noncompatible (ordered) pairs of primes (p₁, p₂) such that p_i ≡ p_i < 200, i = 1,2 we establish the existence of Z-cyclic triplewhist tournaments on 3p₁ p₂ + 1 players. It is believed that these results are the first examples of such tournaments, indeed the first examples of Z-cyclic whist tournaments for such players. In Part 2 we extend the results of this study and establish the existence of Z-cyclic triplewhist tournaments on players for all α₁ ≥ 1, α₂ ≥ 1 and p₁, p₂ as described above. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

The Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution with loss aversion

We consider bargaining problems under the assumption that players are loss averse, i.e., experience disutility from obtaining an outcome lower than some reference point. We follow the approach of Shalev (2002) by imposing the self-supporting condition on an outcome: an outcome z in a bargaining problem is self-supporting under a given bargaining solution, whenever transforming the problem using outcome z as a reference point, yields a transformed problem in which the solution is z.We show that n-player bargaining problems have a unique self-supporting outcome under the Kalai-Smorodinsky solution. For all possible loss aversion coefficients we determine the bargaining solutions that give exactly these outcomes, and characterize them by the standard axioms of Scale Invariance, Individual Monotonicity, and Strong Individual Rationality, and a new axiom called Proportional Concession Invariance (PCI). A bargaining solution satisfies PCI if moving the utopia point in the direction of the solution outcome does not change this outcome.     

More cyclic triplewhist tournaments

We extend the set of values of n for which it is known that a Z-cyclic triple whist tournament for 4n players exists by proving that if there exists such a tournament for q + 1 players, where q ≡ 3 (mod 4) is prime, then there exists such a tournament for qp^a1₁…p^an_n + 1 players, whenever the p_i are primes ≡ 5 (mod 8). © 1995 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Divide the dollar and conquer more: sequential bargaining and risk aversion

We analyze the problem of dividing a fixed amount of a single commodity between two players on the basis of the Nash bargaining solution (NBS). For one-shot negotiations, a cornerstone result of Roth (Axiomatic models of bargaining. Springer, Berlin, 1979) establishes that the more risk averse player will obtain less than half the total amount. In the present paper, we assume that the bargaining procedure occurs over several rounds. In each round, an increasing share of the total amount is negotiated over in accordance with the NBS, the disagreement point being determined by the outcome of the previous round. In line with Roth’s result, the final amount received by the more risk averse player is still bounded by half the total amount. As a new feature, however, this player does not lose from bargaining for more rounds if his opponent exhibits non-increasing absolute risk aversion. What is more, both players’ risk profiles become essentially irrelevant if successive bargaining takes place over sufficiently small commodity increments. Each player then gets approximately half of the commodity.     

Negotiation,preferences over agreements,and the core

We analyze conditions under which negotiated agreements are efficient from the point of view of every possible coalition of negotiators. The negotiators have lexicographic preferences over agreements they reach. Their utility is the first criterion. The coalition reaching an agreement is the second criterion. In the analyzed non-cooperative discrete time bargaining game Γ the players bargain about the choice from the sets of utility vectors feasible for coalitions in a given NTU game (N, V). If Γ has a Markov perfect equilibrium, then the set of equilibrium utility vectors in Markov perfect equilibria in it equals the core of (N, V). I thank an anonymous referee, an anonymous Associate Editor, and the Editor for their comments that helped me to improve the paper. The research reported in this paper was supported by the Grant VEGA 1/1223/04 of the Ministry of Education of the Slovak Republic.     

Bargaining sets of cooperative games without side payments

In this paper an analogue of the bargaining setM ₁ ⁱ is defined for cooperative games without side payments. An existence theorem is proved for games of pairs, while it is shown by an example that no general existence theorem holds.     

Alliance or no alliance—Bargaining power in competing reverse supply chains

This work investigates how bargaining power affects negotiations between manufacturers and reverse logistics providers in reverse supply chains under government intervention using a novel three-stage reverse supply chain model for two scenarios, a reverse logistics provider alliance and no reverse logistics provider alliance. Utilizing the asymmetric Nash bargaining game, this work seeks equilibrium negotiation solutions. Analytical results indicate that the reverse logistics provider alliance increases the bargaining power of reverse logistics providers when negotiating with a manufacturer for a profitable recycled-component supply contract; however, manufacturer profits are often reduced. Particularly in the case of an recycled-component vender-dominated market, a reverse logistics alliance with extreme bargaining power may cause a counter-profit effect that results in the decreases of profits for all players involved, including buyers (i.e., manufacturers) and allied recycled-component venders (i.e., reverse logistics providers). Additional managerial insights are provided for discussion.     

A dynamic solution in N-person cooperative game theory

We formulate a cooperative game as an extended form game in which each player in turn proposes payoffs to a coalition over M steps. Payoffs at time t are discounted by a penalty function f(t). If all players in a coalition agree to their payoffs, they receive them. Under a convergence hypothesis verified by computer for three players in many cases, we compute the payoffs resulting from a coalition pattern and give necessary conditions for particular patterns. The resulting solution is related to the Nash bargaining solution and the competitive solution.