This paper considers a market where pairs of agents who are interested in carrying out a transaction are brought together by a stochastic process and, upon meeting, initiate a bargaining process over the terms of the transaction.The basic bargaining problem is treated with the strategic approach.The paper derives the steady state equilibrium agreements; analyzes their dependence on market conditions such as the relative numbers of agents of different types; and discusses their relations with the competitive equilibrium outcome and other results in the search equilibrium literature.1133

Janusz A. Ordover, Ariel Rubinstein; A Sequential Concession Game with Asymmetric Information*, The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Volume 101, Issue 4, 1 Novem

A new model of persuasion is presented. A listener first announces and commits to a codex (i.e., a set of conditions). The speaker then presents a (not necessarily true) profile that must satisfy the codex in order for the listener to be persuaded. The speaker is boundedly rational in the sense that his ability to come up with a persuasive profile is limited and depends on the true profile and the content and framing of the codex. The circumstances under which the listener can design a codex that will implement his goal are fully characterized.

We develop a framework for modelling choice in the presence of framing effects. An extended choice function assigns a chosen element to every pair (A, f) where A is a set of alternatives, and f is a frame. A frame includes observable information that is irrelevant in the rational assessment of the alternatives, but nonetheless affects choice. We relate the new framework to the classical model of choice correspondence. Conditions are identified under which there exists either a transitive or a transitive and complete binary relation R such that an alternative x is chosen in some (A, f) iff x is R-maximal in the set A. We then demonstrate that the framework of choice correspondence misses information, which is essential to economic modelling, and which is incorporated in the extended choice function.

We propose a new abstract definition of equilibrium in the spirit of competitive equilibrium: a profile of alternatives and a public ordering (expressing prestige, price, or a social norm) such that each agent prefers his assigned alternative to all lower-ranked ones. The equilibrium operates in an abstract setting built upon a concept of convexity borrowed from convex geometry. We apply the concept to a variety of convex economies and relate it to Pareto optimality. The “magic” of linear equilibrium prices is put into perspective by establishing an analogy between linear functions in the standard convexity and “primitive orderings” in the abstract convexity. (JEL I11, I18, J44, K13)

We study experimentally a new two-player game: each player requests an amount between 11 and 20 shekels. He receives the requested amount and if he requests exactly one shekel less than the other player, he receives an additional 20 shekels. Level-k reasoning is appealing due to the natural starting point (requesting 20) and the straightforward best-response operation. Nevertheless, almost all subjects exhibit at most three levels of reasoning. Two variants of the game demonstrate that the depth of reasoning is not increased by enhancing the attractiveness of the level-0 strategy or by reducing the cost of undercutting the other player.

The paper presents a notion of rationalizing choice functions that violate the “Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives” axiom. A collection of linear orderings is said to provide a rationalization by multiple rationales for a choice function if the choice from any choice set can be rationalized by one of the orderings. We characterize a tight upper bound on the minimal number of orderings that is required to rationalize arbitrary choice functions, and calculate the minimal number for several specific choice procedures.

Ariel Rubinstein, Zvi Safra, William Thomson, On the Interpretation of the Nash Bargaining Solution and Its Extension to Non-Expected Utility Preferences, Econometrica, Vol. 60, No. 5 (Sep., 1992), pp. 1171-1186