Suchergebnisse

Is there a bargaining equilibrium comparable to the equilibrium in the competitive economy? The claim in this paper is that there is not. Bargaining models with well-specified equilibria have been built upon a shared sense of what is fair, concessions in proportion to harm from failure to agree or an imposed bargaining procedure. The claim is that these models either come dangerously close to assuming what they seek to prove or define bargaining as something other than what it is commonly understood to be. We know that people strike bargains and that civilized life could not proceed otherwise, but something over and above pure self-interest is required for bargaining and compromise to take place. Adapted from the source document.

Before the May 1979 General Election there were suggestions from both sides of industry and from all political parties that, in the wake of the collapse of a more-or-less formal incomes policy, there should at least be some sort of national 'forum' to discuss the implications for the economy of different outcomes of pay bargaining rounds. It is now clear that the Government has for the time being decided not to set up a new body of this kind. Nevertheless the issues which such a body would have to consider remain, and it seemed to us worthwhile to attempt to set out the kinds of question which should be borne in mind by all parties concerned with pay bargaining and pay determination during the coming wage round. What follows is deliberately written in a non-technical way: at the same time, we hope not to have done serious injustice to the complexity of the problems.

NEARLY ALL WARS END NOT BECAUSE THE STATES THAT ARE FIGHTING ARE INCAPABLE OF FURTHER FIGHTING BUT BECAUSE THEY AGREE TO STOP. THUS, TO EXPLAIN WHY WARS OCCUR ONE MUST EXPLAIN WHY STATES MUST FIGHT BEFORE REACHING AGREEMENT, WHICH IMPLIES THAT WAR MUST BE CONSIDERED PART OF THE BARGAINING PROCESS THAT LEADS TO A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT AND NOT AS AN ALTERNATIVE TO IT. HOWEVER, MOST ATTEMPTS TO EXPLAIN THE OCCURRENCE OF WAR ASSUME THAT IT IS ENTIRELY THE RESULT OF A CHOICE MADE BEFORE IT BEGINS. THIS ARTICLE SHOWS THAT THIS WAY OF POSING THE QUESTION CAN ONLY LEAD TO MISLEADING CONCLUSIONS BY ANALYZING A MODEL IN WHICH A NEGOTIATED SETTLEMENT REMAINS POSSIBLE AFTER WAR STARTS.

Bargaining in legislatures is conducted according to formal rules specifying who may make proposals and how they will be decided. Legislative outcomes depend on those rules and on the structure of the legislature. Although the social choice literature provides theories about voting equilibria, it does not endogenize the formation of the agenda on which the voting is based and rarely takes into account the institutional structure found in legislatures. In our theory members of the legislature act noncooperatively in choosing strategies to serve their own districts, explicitly taking into account the strategies members adopt in response to the sequential nature of proposal making and voting. The model permits the characterization of a legislative equilibrium reflecting the structure of the legislature and also allows consideration of the choice of elements of that structure in a context in which the standard, institution-free model of social choice theory yields no equilibrium.

This article surveys the theoretical literature on legislative bargaining with endogenous status-quo. These are the legislative bargaining situations in which in each period a new policy is decided and the policy implemented in the event of no agreement is endogenously determined by the outcome of bargaining in the previous period. After describing a general framework, we discus bargaining over redistributive policies, bargaining over spatial policies, existence issues, efficiency issues and open questions.