Introduction to Volume III: “Strategic Bargaining”

A topic that received a lot of attention from the research group throughout the year the group was together at the ZiF was that of strategic bargaining. The inspiration came from papers by Binmore (1985), Rubinstein (1982) and Selten (1981) which were carefully studied and critically discussed at the time the research project started. All the papers collected in this volume, except the one by Selten and Güth, deal with bargaining under conditions of complete information. The papers of Okada and Haller consider bilateral bargaining problems. The Selten/Wooders paper deals with bargaining in a market context in which the number of participants varies over time. The remaining papers consider coalitional bargaining problems with a fixed number of players and they can be viewed as pursuing the “Nash program” of investigating whether concepts from cooperative game theory can be implemented by means of noncooperative bargaining procedures. The Bennett/van Damure paper is restricted to games with transferable utility, while Bennett considers general NTU games. Laing and Albers/Laing consider bargaining in a spatial context where the problem is which location to choose. Laing provides a theoretical analysis whereas Albers/Laing present experimental results obtained in this setting.