Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study

Alexander Elbittar (), Andrei Gomberg and Laura Sour
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Laura Sour: CIDE

Microeconomics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Many rent-sharing decisions in a society result from a bargaining process between groups of individuals (such as between the executive and the legislative branches of government, between legislative factions, between corporate management and shareholders, etc.). We conduct a laboratory study of the effect of different voting procedures on group decision-making in the context of ultimatum bargaining. Earlier studies have suggested that when the bargaining game is played by unstructured groups of agents, rather than by individuals, the division of the payoff is substantially affected in favor of the ultimatum-proposers. Our theoretical arguments suggest that one explanation for this could be implicit voting rules within groups. We explicitly structure the group decision-making as voting and study the impact of different voting rules on the bargaining outcome. The observed responder behavior is consistent with preferences depending solely on payoff distribution. Furthermore, we observe that proposers react in an expected manner to changes in voting rule in the responder group.

Keywords: Bargaining games; group decision making and experimental design. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C92 D44 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 41 pages
Date: 2005-11-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 41
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study (2011)
Working Paper: Group decision-making and voting in ultimatum bargaining: an experimental study (2011)
Working Paper: Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study (2011)
Working Paper: Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study (2005)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpa:wuwpmi:0511005

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