“将心比心”能促进双赢吗?——换位思考在买卖谈判中的作用

本文通过模拟谈判的方式发现，在买卖谈判中，谈判者的换位思考能够促进双赢，并提高关系的质量。并且，在谈判中不同的角色也会影响到换位思考，卖方比买方有着更多的换位思考行为。最后，买方的换位思考比卖方更能影响谈判结果的整合程度。综合起来，该结果表明，在谈判中谈判者应尽量进行换位思考以提高整合性，买方尤其应注意这一点。     

THE HIDDEN COST OF BARGAINING: EVIDENCE FROM A CHEATING-PRONE MARKETPLACE

It is widely believed that successful bargaining helps consumers increase their surplus. We present evidence from a field experiment showing that bargaining over price reduces buyer surplus in a marketplace where sellers cheat on the weight whose value may more than offset the price discount. Our results show that bargaining entails hidden costs since sellers cheat significantly more when buyers bargain than not and they cheat significantly more when bargaining succeeds than fails. Overall bargaining reduces buyer surplus than not bargaining. Our result is relevant for credence goods markets where bargaining over prices may induce sellers to “undertreat” more.     

Strategic delay and endogenous offers in bargaining games with private information

This paperendogenously determines the order of offers and the duration of delay in reaching agreement between buyers and sellers in a continuous-time bargaining game in which a seller wishes to vend an object of known cost to a buyer, to whom the value of the good is private information, and in which each player can choose to strategically delay a response to a previous offer or to interrupt the delay of his rival. Both buyers and sellers are shown to prefer to move first in a model of bargaining in which: (1) either player can make the first offer; (2) after the minimum time has elapsed from the previous offer, either player can make an offer; and (3) players can choose to strategically delay and refrain from making an offer after the previous offer. When the buyer moves first, the equilibrium response for the seller is to accept the offer immediately. When the seller moves first the equilibrium is characterized by the seller making all but the last offer, with minimal feasible delay between successive offers. Observable endogenous delay in reaching an agreement in such equilibria approaches zero as the minimal feasible delay between offers approaches zero. This indicates that in noncooperative bargaining models with private information, where players can strategically delay their offers, endogenizing the order in which players make offers removes the ability of informational asymmetries to generate equilibria exhibiting endogenous delay in reaching an agreement.     

Buyer groups as strategic commitments

Buyer cooperatives, buyer alliances, and horizontal mergers are often perceived as attempts to increase buyer power. In contrast to prior research emphasizing group size, I show that even small buyer groups composed of buyers with heterogeneous preferences can increase price competition among rival sellers by committing to purchase exclusively from one seller. Without transfer payments, at least one buyer group exists for each pair of sellers and buyer groups membership is chosen to achieve indifference between the two sellers. With transfer payments, and just two sellers, the grand coalition is a coalition-proof subgame perfect equilibrium (CP-SPNE), though equilibria with arbitrarily many buyer groups also exist. With three sellers (and with more sellers when the distribution of buyers is symmetric), a CP-SPNE always exists, all coalition-proof equilibria are payoff equivalent and have at least one buyer group for each pair of firms, so the grand coalition is not an equilibrium.     

The inefficiency of price quantity bargaining

In bargaining between a buyer and several sellers on prices and quantities, strategic inefficiencies arise. By reallocating quantities between agreements, the buyer can increase its share of the surplus. With two symmetric sellers producing substitutes, the quantity in the first agreement will be higher than the efficient quantity, and the quantity in the last lower, thus implying that sellers are strategically discriminated. When asymmetries are not too large and sellers produce substitutes, the buyer first agrees with the seller with the lowest marginal cost and only the most efficient order of agreement is an equilibrium outcome. When goods are complements, both equilibrium quantities are lower than the efficient levels.     

On the cultural basis of gender differences in negotiation

We study how culture and social structure influence bargaining behavior across gender, by exploring the negotiation culture in matrilineal and patriarchal societies using data from a laboratory experiment and a natural field experiment. One interesting result is that in both the actual marketplace and in the laboratory bargaining game, women in the matrilineal society earn more than men, at odds with years of evidence observed in the western world. We find that this result is critically driven by which side of the market the person is occupying: female (male) sellers in the matrilineal (patriarchal) society extract more of the bargaining surplus than male (female) sellers. In the buyer role, however, we observe no significant differences across societies.     

Bilateral bargaining, unverifiable quality, and options to return

Summary. The paper investigates an alternating-offers bargaining game between a buyer and a seller who face several trading opportunities. These items (goods or services) differ in their non-verifiable quality characteristics which gives rise to a moral hazard problem on the seller's part. For the special case of two goods, we completely characterize the set of subgame-perfect equilibria. We find that the seller always extends an option to return the good, while the buyer may suffer from this warranty. Also, qualitatively different types of equilibrium outcomes occur depending on the parameters of the model: (a) the seller may obtain a larger share of the surplus although the parties ex ante have symmetric bargaining positions, (b) the subgame-perfect equilibrium may entail inefficient trade, and (c) multiple equilibria may exist including equilibria with delay in negotiations. Finally, we analyze a situation where bargaining proceeds after the good was returned which is shown to reestablish uniqueness and efficiency of equilibrium.Received: 23 August 2001, Revised: 3 April 2003, JEL Classification Numbers: C78, L14, L15, D82. Correspondence to: Christoph LülfesmannThis paper has greatly benefitted from discussions with Avner Shaked and Timothy von Zandt. We also wish to thank Wolfgang Leininger, Zvika Neeman, Clemens Puppe, Wolfram Richter, Karl Schlag, Ilya Segal, and seminar participants in Dortmund, Bonn and Berkeley for helpful comments and discussions. Financial support by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, SFB 303 at the University of Bonn is gratefully acknowledged.     

The rate of convergence to perfect competition of matching and bargaining mechanisms

We study the steady state of a market with incoming cohorts of buyers and sellers who are matched pairwise and bargain under private information. A friction parameter is τ, the length of the time period until the next meeting. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition for the convergence of mechanism outcomes to perfect competition at the linear rate in τ, which is shown to be the fastest possible among all bargaining mechanisms. The condition requires that buyers and sellers always retain some bargaining power. The bargaining mechanisms that satisfy this condition are called nonvanishing bargaining power (NBP) mechanisms. Simple random proposer take-it-or-leave-it protocols are NBP, while k-double auctions (k-DA) are not. We find that k-DAs have equilibria that converge to perfect competition at a linear rate, converge at a slower rate or even do not converge at all.     

Multiple equilibria in bargaining models of decentralized trade

Summary A market in which population size is endogenously determined is modeled. Buyers and sellers are randomly matched upon entering the market, whereupon they engage in non-cooperative bilateral bargaining. It is shown that general matching technologies and heterogeneity of buyer or seller populations often result in multiple market equilibria. Up to four equilibria can occur and the equilibria can always be ranked according to population size. Under some conditions all equilibria can also be Pareto ranked. The set of equilibria depends on the relative population sizes of different types of potential entrant, market entry costs, and the degree of differentiation between agents on the same side of the market.This paper evolved from a chapter in my dissertation. I am indebted to Leo Simon for many helpful conversations. Michael Hanemann, Jeff Perloff, Stefan Reichelstein, Jim Vercammen, Brian Wright, and participants in seminars at U.C. Berkeley, the University of Maryland, the University of British Columbia and the Australian National University also provided useful comments. Lastly, I benefited greatly from the thorough comments and corrections provided by an anonymous referee.     

The Evolutionary Stability of Auctions over Bargaining

This paper considers equilibrium in transaction mechanisms. In an environment with homogeneous buyers and sellers, which eliminates the advantage auctions possess of matching buyers and sellers, both auctions and bargaining are equilibria. However, only auctions are evolutionarily stable. This identifies a new advantage of auctions over bargaining, arising from the division of the gains from trade.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C78, C73, D44.     

Stationary equilibria in bargaining with externalities

This paper studies infinite-horizon bargaining between a seller and multiple buyers when externalities are present. We extend the analysis in Jehiel and Moldovanu by allowing for both pure and mixed equilibria [Jehiel, P., Moldovanu, B., 1995a. Cyclical delay in bargaining with externalities. Rev. Econ. Stud. 62, 619–637]. A characterization of the stationary subgame perfect equilibria in generic games is presented. Equilibria with delay exist only for strong positive externalities. Since each buyer receives a positive payoff when the seller makes an agreement with some other buyer, positive externalities induce a war of attrition between buyers.     

Is There a Hold‐up Problem?

We report on a hold‐up experiment in which unilateral investment is followed by bilateral bargaining according to Nash’s demand game. Without communication, investment is low and coordination is poor. Unilateral communication facilitates coordination, but not perfectly. Successful coordination predominantly entails “fair” outcomes. Perhaps surprisingly, sellers (investors) do at least as well under buyer communication as under seller communication.     

Sequential bargaining in a market with one seller and two different buyers

A matching and bargaining model in a market with one seller and two buyers, differing only in their reservation price, is analyzed. No subgame perfect equilibrium exists for stationary strategies. We demonstrate the existence of inefficient equilibria in which the low buyer receives the good with large probability, even as friction becomes negligible. We investigate the relationship between the use of Nash and sequential bargaining. Nash bargaining seems applicable only when the sequential approach yields a unique stationary strategy subgame perfect equilibrium.     

Asymmetric first-price menu auctions under intricate uncertainty

This paper studies asymmetric first-price menu auctions in the procurement environment where the buyer does not commit to a decision rule and asymmetric sellers have interdependent costs and statistically affiliated signals. Sellers compete in bidding a menu of contracts, where a contract specifies a vector of characteristics and a payment required from the buyer for delivering these characteristics. The buyer does not commit ex-ante to a decision rule but rather upon observing all the menus offered by sellers chooses the best contract. This paper establishes the existence of a continuum of separating monotone equilibria in this game bounded above by the jointly ex-post efficient outcome and below by the jointly interim efficient outcome. It shows that the jointly ex-post efficient equilibrium outcome is the only ex-post renegotiation-proof outcome and it is also ex-ante robust to all continuation equilibria.     

Indeterminacy and directed search

The directed search approach assumes each seller posts a fixed price and, ex post, randomly allocates the good should more than one buyer desire the good. This paper assumes sellers can post prices which are contingent on ex post realized demand; e.g. an advertisement might state the Bertrand price should there be more than one buyer, which corresponds to an auction outcome. Competition in fixed prices and ex post rationing describes equilibrium behavior. There is also real market indeterminacy: a continuum of equilibria exists which are not payoff equivalent. Sellers prefer the equilibrium in auctions.     

Bargaining and separation costs in two-sided markets

A two-sided market is characterized by contract negotiations, bilateral exchanges between buyers and sellers. Separation costs endow trading partners with monopoly power, rendering this a market of bilateral monopolistic competition. Market equilibrium is defined by these negotiations, a matching of the two sides, and a set of prices; the costs of disagreement are endogenous. A bargaining strategy some players use is commitment to a position. Disagreements are possible and, contrary to the case of bilateral monopoly, these disagreements are not always inefficient.     

垄断厂商产量决策的TU博弈分析

传统经济学在对垄断分析中,总是将垄断厂商的低供给水平,看作是衡量垄断的指标,即垄断厂商通过低供给来实现垄断.没有低供给这条假设,似乎就不能找到判定垄断是否存在的标准了.本文通过对垄断厂商与购买者的议价博弈进行分析,建立了一个产出可以由一系列议价结果所表示的模型.并指出如果将垄断厂商的议价信心指数(α)纳入到产量选择上,垄断厂商的决策将有很大改变.最后,本文得出,低供给只是解释垄断的部分原因.     

A Walrasian Rubinstein and Wolinsky model

We provide a full dynamic analysis of a continuous-time variant of Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1985) matching and bargaining model with unbalanced flows of buyers and sellers. The focus is on the price limit as the frictions of search are removed. It is found that a necessary and sufficient condition for the limit price to be Walrasian at all times is the alignment of the initial buyer and seller stocks with the flows.     

Dynamic price competition

We consider the model of price competition for a single buyer among many sellers in a dynamic environment. The surplus from each trade is allowed to depend on the path of previous purchases, and as a result, the model captures phenomena such as learning by doing and habit formation in consumption.We characterize Markovian equilibria for finite and infinite horizon versions of the model and show that the stationary infinite horizon version of the model possesses an efficient equilibrium where all the sellers receive an equilibrium payoff equal to their marginal contribution to the social welfare.     

A model of seller holdout

Summary. We model a buyer who wishes to combine objects owned by two separate sellers in order to realize higher value. Sellers are able to avoid entering into negotiations with the buyer, so that the order in which they negotiate is endogenous. Holdout occurs if at least one of the sellers is not present in the first round of negotiations. We demonstrate that complementarity of the buyers technology is a necessary condition for equilibrium holdout. Moreover, a rise in complementarity leads to an increased likelihood of holdout, and an increased efficiency loss. Applications include patents, the land assembly problem, and mergers.Received: 20 November 2002, Revised: 4 September 2003JEL Classification Numbers: L14, L21, C78.Correspondence to: Flavio MenezesThis paper benefited from insights by Paulo Monteiro. Thanks to seminar participants at the ANU, the University of Sydney and the University of Arizona. Murali Agastya, Robert Innes, John Quiggin, Kunal Sengupta and anonymous referees provided useful feedback. F. Menezes gratefully acknowledges the support of ARC grant (no. 000000055). Pitchford is grateful for the use of economics department facilities while a visiting scholar at Harvard University.