Bargaining and Justice

Bargaining situations are usually analysed in terms of an ordinal or cardinal representation of players’ preferences, and not the underlying allocations of goods, monetary transfers, etc. This abstraction makes bargaining models versatile and applicable in many contexts. In Chap. 1, the classical bargaining problems of bilateral exchange and the division of rents in a bilateral monopoly have been the chief examples. Chapter 2 has considered the repeated division of surpluses which may also be created by social rather than economic interaction. Then, Chap. 3 has investigated implications of bilateral bargaining in the context of political decision-making. This chapter will depart further from pure economics. It deals with principles of social justice, and the norms and institutions which organize surplus sharing at the level of society.