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Communication in bargaining games with unanimity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Marina Agranov  and
Chloe Tergiman
Marina Agranov*
Affiliation:
California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA
Chloe Tergiman
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University, State College, USA
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

Communication has been shown to increase proposer power in multilateral bargaining settings that use majority voting rule via competition between non-proposers for a place in the coalition. In this paper we investigate whether communication affects bargaining outcomes and the bargaining process in settings in which the competition effect is not present. We study committees that use unanimity rule to pass allocations. We find that in these settings, communication has the complete opposite effect compared with the majority settings: under unanimity, communication eliminates the inefficiencies that are present in settings without communication and it shifts bargaining outcomes towards egalitarian allocations with no proposer power. Communication logs provide insights regarding the topics subjects discuss and communication content correlates with bargaining outcomes.

Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 22 , Issue 2 , 15 June 2019 , pp. 350 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-018-9571-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This research was made possible thanks to the generous support from the Social Science Humanities and Research Council (Canada). We thank the editor and the two anonymous referees for many valuable suggestions, which improved the current paper. The authors would also like to thank Gary Bolton, Alessandra Casella, Timothy Cason, Pedro Dal Bo, Eric Dickson, Sanford Gordon, Yoram Halevy, Alessandro Lizzeri, Rebecca Morton, Muriel Niederle, as well as the seminar participants at Florida State University, London School of Economics, Penn State University, Purdue University, Stanford University, the University of British Columbia, and finally the conference participants of the Economic Science Association (2013), the Public Choice Meetings (2014), the Royal Economic Society (2014) and the Design and Bargaining Workshop in Dallas (2014).

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