Bargaining with Endogenous Deadlines

We develop a two-person negotiation model with complete information which makes endogenous both the deadline and the level of surplus destruction after the deadline. We show that the equilibrium outcome is always unique but might be inefficient. Moreover, as the bargaining period becomes short or as the players become very patient, the unique outcome is always inefficientbargaining;alternating-offers;deadlines;complete infomation

Product Market Integration, Wage Bargaining and Strike Activity

We develop a spatial two-country model of wage determination with private information in unionized imperfectly competitive industries. We investigage the effects of separated product markets opening up for competition as well as of further market integration on the negotiated wage and the strike activity. We show that, when product markets are separated, the wage level and the strike activity are decreasing with the transportation cost and the home market size. However, when markets are integrated, wages and strikes are now increasing with the transportation cost. Finally, we find that the opening of markets for competition has an ambiguous impact on both the negotiated wage and the strike activity.economic integration;horizontal differentiation;product market competition;wage bargaining;strike activity

Union Delegation and Incentives for Merger

We analyze a unionized duopoly model to examine how unions affect the incentives for merger. We find that, once the union has the option to delegate, an increase in the union bargaining power can create incentives for the firms to merge.Union delegation;Wage bargaining;Mergers

Strategic Union Delegation and Strike Activity

We develop a model of wage determination with private information, in which te union has the option to delegate the wage bargaining to either surplus-maximizing delegates or to wage-maximizing delegates (such as senior union members). We show that the strike activity is greater whenever the union chooses wage-maximizing delegates instead of surplus-maximizing delegates. We also provide the necessary and sufficient condition such that it is always optimal for the union to choose wage-maximizing delegates and we we find that the efficiency loss due to strategic delegation may be quite important.Union delegation;Wage bargaining;Private information;Strike activity

The Equivalence of the Dekel-Fudenberg Iterative Procedure and Weakly Perfect Rationalizability

Two approaches have been proposed in the literature to refine the rationalizability solution concept: either assuming that players make small errors when playing their strategies, or assuming that there is a small amount of payoff uncertainty. We show that both approaches lead to the same refinement if errors are made according to the concept of weakly perfect rationalizability, and there is payoff uncertainty as in Dekel and Fudenberg [Journal of Economic Theory 52 (1990), 243-267]. For both cases, the strategies that survive are obtained by starting with one round of elimination of weakly dominated strategies followed by many rounds of elimination of strictly dominated strategies.Rationalizability, refinements

Von Neumann-Morgenstern farsightedly stable sets in two-sided matching

We adopt the notion of von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) farsightedly stable sets to determine which matchings are possibly stable when agents are farsighted in one-to-one matching problems. We provide the characterization of vNM farsightedly stable sets: a set of matchings is a vNM farsightedly stable set if and only if it is a singleton subset of the core. Thus, contrary to the vNM (myopically) stable sets [Ehlers, J. of Econ. Theory 134 (2007), 537-547], vNM farsightedly stable sets cannot include matchings that are not in the core. Moreover, we show that our main result is robust to many-to-one matching problems with substitutable preferences: a set of matchings is a vNM farsightedly stable set if and only if it is a singleton set and its element is in the strong core.Matching problem, von Neumann-Morgenstern stable sets, farsighted stability

Rationalizability for Social Environments

Social environments constitute a framework in which it is possible to study how groups of agents interact in a society. The framework is general enough to analyse both non-cooperative and cooperative games. We identify a number of shortcomings of existing solution concepts that are used for social environments and propose a new concept called social rationalizability. The concept aims to identify the consequences of common knowledge of rationality and farsightedness within the framework of social environments. The set of socially rationalizable outcomes is shown to be non-empty for all social environments and it can be computed by an iterative reduction procedure. We introduce a definition of coalitional rationality for social environments and show that it is satisfied by social rationalizability

Fuzzy Play, Matching Devices and Coordination Failures

We revisit n-player coordination games with Pareto-ranked Nash equilibria. The novelty is that we introduce fuzzy play and a matching device, where each player does not choose which pure strategy to play, but instead chooses a nonempty subset of his strategy set that he submits to the matching device. The matching device is a very simple one. It only selects a match if possible, and it selects randomly some strategy belonging to the strategy set sent by each player otherwise. That is, it does not impose that the best alternatives are matched. Using the concepts of perfect Nash equilibrium and of trembling-hand perfect rationalizability, we show that players coordinate directly on the Pareto optimal outcome. This implies that they neither use the option of fuzzy play, nor make use of the matching device.

On Rationalizability in Two-Person Alternating-Offer Bargaining

This paper reconsiders Rubinstein's alternating-offer bargaining game with complete information. We define rationalizability for multi-stage games with observed actions. Whe show that rationalizability does not exclude perpetual disagreement or delay. Then, we define trembling-hand rationalizability and we show that it implies a unique solution. Moreover, this unique solution is the subgame perfect equilibrium. We also reconsider an extension of Rubinstein's game wherein there is a smallest money unit.bargaining; alternating-offer; rationalizability; money unit