The Dynamics of Bargaining Postures: The Role of a Third Party

In many real world negotiations, from wage contract bargaining to product liability disputes, the bargaining parties often interact repeatedly and have the option of seeking outside judgement. This paper studies a model of repeated bargaining with a third party to analyze how and why bargaining postures endogenously evolve over time. A privately informed long-lived player bargains with a sequence of short-lived players, one at a time. Should the players fail to reach an agreement, an unbiased yet imperfect third party is called upon to make a judgement. The uninformed short-lived players learn through two channels: observed behavior of the informed player (\soft" information) and, if any, verdicts of the third party (\hard" information). The long-lived player wants to guard his private information by bargaining tough but at the expense of more information disclosure from the third party. As a result of the strategic use of these two sources of information, the players' bargaining postures change as the uninformed players' beliefs evolve. Interestingly, as third party information becomes more precise, the players adopt tough bargaining postures for a wider range of beliefs. Many repeated bargaining problems can be analyzed in this framework. In particular, the equilibrium dynamics provide an explanation for the puzzling contrast between the bargaining postures of Merck and Pfizer in their recent high-profile product liability litigations. The results also help us understand several other phenomena documented in the related literature.bargaining posture, repeated bargaining, third party information, reputation

Public Health Nursing Acceptance of the 5 A’s Protocol for Prenatal Smoking Cessation

Oregon’s efforts in tobacco cessation have historically focused on the general population and have depended on quit line services as the primary intervention. The Oregon Smoke Free Mothers and Babies Program (SFMB) was developed in 2002 to focus on public health nurses and prenatal care providers who work with high risk pregnant women. It seeks to increase smoking cessation among low income and other high risk pregnant women by disseminating the U.S. Public Health Service best practices, the 5 A’s (Ask, Advise, Assess, Assist, Arrange) tobacco brief intervention protocol, to public health nurses and prenatal care providers. Interventions included teaching nurses the 5 A’s, how to use stages of change for pregnant quitters and providing them with client materials. We report the survey results gathered from nurses regarding their use of the 5 A’s. Nurses were questioned at 3 intervals: at the beginning of the SFMB project, 12 months later and 24 months later. While over 45 nurses in 10 counties were involved in the program, staff turnover and budget cuts affected program evaluation and analysis of the survey responses. As a result, only 10 nurses completed all three surveys. We found that, at baseline, all of the nurses were already performing the Ask and Advise components. The training resulted in a significant increase in the nurses using Assess (p\u3c0.05) and Assist (p\u3c0.05) both at 12 and 24 months. We also found that there was a statistically significant increase in the use of Arrange at 12 months (p\u3c0.01) that was not sustained at 24 months (p=0.07). We conclude that public health nurses were already routinely doing Ask and Advise; our 5 A’s program was successful in improving Assess and Assist. More work is needed to understand why increases in Arrange were not sustained