Generosity in bargaining: Fair or fear?

Yves Breitmoser () and Jonathan Tan

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Are "generous" bargaining offers made out of fairness or in fear of rejection? We disentangle risk and social references by analyzing experimental behavior in three majority bargaining games: (1) a random-proposer game with infinite time horizon; 2) a one round proposer game with disagreement payoffs equal to the infinite horizon continuation payoffs; and, (3) a demand commitment game. Inequity aversion predicts very differently across these games, but risk aversion does not. Observed strategies violate neither stationarity nor truncation consistency. This allows us to use structural models of bargaining behavior to estimate the latent type shares of subjects with CES, inequity averse, and Prospect theoretic preferences. The Prospect theoretic, i.e. reference-dependent, model of utility explains the observations far better than any mixture of alternative models.

Keywords: coalitional bargaining; non-cooperative modeling; random utility model; quantal response equilibrium; laboratory experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 C78 D78 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2010-12-14
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-evo, nep-exp, nep-gth, nep-hpe, nep-mic and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:27444

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