Two-Party Agreements as Circular Sets

Barry O'Neill

Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Abstract: In making an agreement with someone, I conditionally promise to perform a certain action, conditioning my obligation on their both making a corresponding promise and performing their action. What promise should I require? That they simply commit to perform is not enough. I should demand the kind of promise I am making myself, and they should demand the same of me. This makes our promises indirectly self-referential. Assuming the performance actions are specified, my promise can be characterized as a set of available promises, all those the other could make to activate my obligation. We have an agreement if each one’s promise is a member of the other’s promise. Assume that the set P of available promises satisfies (1) Aczel’s axiom for circular sets; (2) transitivity: if the obligation of $p \in P$ is activated by $p’$, then $p’ \in P$; and (3) superset closure: if $p \in P$ is activated by $p’$, $p$ is activated by any promise that implies (is a superset of) $p’$. The focus is on bargaining procedures that treat the parties symmetrically (e.g., no specified offerer or accepter.) Each party chooses an agreement promise $p*$ such that (4) if both make $p*$ and one performs, the other is obligated to perform; (5) if one makes $p*$ and the other does not, the former is not unilaterally obligated. It is shown that among available promise sets of a given size, exactly one contains an agreement promise and contains exactly one of them.

Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2018-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp722.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp722.pdf [302 Moved Temporarily]--> https://ratio.huji.ac.il/sites/default/files/publications/dp722.pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:huj:dispap:dp722

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Paper Series from The Federmann Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University, Jerusalem Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael Simkin ().