Abstract
This chapter focuses on the role of experiments in guiding theorists and policymakers working on design issues in negotiations. More specifically, our focus will be on unstructured bargaining experiments. I argue that the experimental research on bargaining should gradually shift focus from highly structured and simplified bargaining experiments to more unstructured bargaining experiments. Our supporting arguments will be based on experimental findings from bargaining and surplus sharing experiments, theoretical developments in bargaining research and behavioral economics, computerization of economic experiments, improved ability to conduct online experiments with large subject pools, and the recent developments in data science and econometrics.
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Notes
- 1.
Güth (2012) also mentions the revival of unstructured bargaining experiments as one of the future directions.
- 2.
It can be argued that Chamberlin (1948) and Smith (1962) were also early examples of unstructured bargaining experiments. The former utilized bilateral bargaining to study the efficiency of markets and the latter utilized double auctions for the same reason. We do not describe them in detail here since they were not directly connected to the theoretical literature on bargaining.
- 3.
Some exceptions are studies by Roth and coauthors, who also analyzed process variables and the work of social psychologists who were always interested in the process.
- 4.
Ståhl (1972) introduced the alternating offers bargaining model but did not provide an equilibrium characterization, which is possibly why Rubinstein's work made a larger impact.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Nick Feltovich, Werner Güth, and Jean-François Laslier for helpful comments.
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Karagözoğlu, E. (2019). On “Going Unstructured” in Bargaining Experiments. In: Laslier, JF., Moulin, H., Sanver, M., Zwicker, W. (eds) The Future of Economic Design. Studies in Economic Design. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18050-8_40
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