Strategic Complexity Promotes Egalitarianism in Legislative Bargaining

Marina Agranov, S. Nageeb Ali, B. Douglas Bernheim and Thomas Palfrey

No 34083, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can be difficult to assess even with relatively simple bargaining protocols. We evaluate experimentally how strategic complexity affects the ability to identify weak coalition partners, and for the partners themselves to determine whether their positions are weak or strong. We find that, as strategic complexity progressively obscures bargaining strength, proposers migrate to egalitarianism, in significant part because non-proposers begin placing substantial weight on fairness. Greater analytic skill dampens but does not eliminate these patterns.

JEL-codes: C73 C92 D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-lab
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