We experimentally investigate, in an unstructured bargaining environment with commonly known money payoffs, the Attraction Effect and Compromise Effect (AE and CE) in bargaining, namely a tendency for bargainers to agree to an intermediate option (CE), or to an option that dominates another option (AE). We conjecture that the relevance of the AE and CE in bargaining is constrained by how focal the feasible agreements' payoffs are. We indeed observe that there are significant AEs and CEs, but these effects are mediated by the efficiency and equality properties of the feasible agreements. Due to the allure of equality, the effects are harder to observe when an equal earnings contract is available. Decoys are more effective in shifting agreements from a very unequal contract to a less unequal one rather than the reverse.

This paper studies an extensive form game of coalition formation with random proposers in games with externalities. It is shown that an agreement will be reached without delay if any set of coalitions profits from merging. Even under this strong condition, the equilibrium coalition structure is not necessarily efficient. There may be multiple equilibria even in the absence of externalities, and symmetric players are not necessarily treated symmetrically in equilibrium. If the grand coalition forms without delay in equilibrium, expected payoffs must be in the core of the characteristic function game that assigns to each coalition its equilibrium payoff. Compared with the rule of order process of Ray and Vohra (Games Econ Behav 26:286–336, 1999), the bargaining procedure with random proposers tends to give a large advantage to the proposer, whereas the bargaining procedure with a rule of order tends to favor the responders. The equilibria of the two procedures cannot be ranked in general in terms of efficiency.

We study the formation of networks in environments where agents derive benefits from their neighbours (immediate links) but suffer losses through contagion when any agent on a path that connects them is hit by a shock. We first consider networks with undirected links (e.g. epidemics, underground resistance organizations, trade networks). We find that the only networks that satisfy strong notions of stability are comprised of disjoint subgraphs that are complete. Then, we consider networks with directed links and we find that stable networks can be asymmetric, connected but not completely connected, thus capturing the main features of production and financial networks. We also identify a trade-off between efficiency and stability.

We investigate a novel way to encourage separation between firms, causing local pollution, and their victims (households): payments from households to distant polluting firms. These payments do not require monitoring of firms' emissions or their abatement costs. In our model, households and firms can choose from two locations (A and B, with A larger than B). Households incur environmental damage from firms in the same location. Under laissez faire, payments from households in one location (say A) to firms in the other location (say B) will prompt firms to move from A to B and to stay there, thus reducing damage to households in A. The maximum that households are willing to pay temporarily is the amount that currently makes them indifferent between A and B. The payments make A less attractive to firms as well as to households. The unique positive-payment equilibrium implements the global welfare optimum where laissez faire does not. We examine from which starting points this payment equilibrium can be reached.

The standard model of sequential capacity choices is the Stackelberg quantity leadership model with linear demand. I show that under the standard assumptions, leaders' actions are informative about market conditions and independent of lead-ers' beliefs about the arrivals of followers. However, this Stackelberg independence property relies on all standard assumptions being satisfied. It fails to hold whenever the demand function is non-linear, marginal cost is not constant, goods are differentiated, firms are non-identical, or there are any externalities. I show that small deviations from the linear demand assumption may make the leaders' choices completely uninformative.

We compare a credit rating agency's incentives to acquire costly information when it is only paid for giving favorable ratings to the corresponding incentives when the agency is paid upfront, i.e. irrespective of the ratings assigned. We show that, in the presence of moral hazard, contingent fees provide stronger dynamic incentives to acquire information than upfront fees and may induce higher social welfare. When the fee structure is chosen by the agency, contingent fees arise as an equilibrium outcome, in line with the way the market for credit rating actually works.

A principal seeks to persuade an agent to accept an offer of uncertain value before a deadline expires. The principal can generate information, but exerts no control over exogenous outside information. The combined effect of the deadline and outside information creates incentives for the principal to keep uncertainty high in the first periods so as to persuade the agent close to the deadline. We characterize the equilibrium, compare it to the single-player decision problem in which exogenous outside information is the agent's only source of information, and examine the welfare implications of our analysis.

This paper presents a simple adaptive model of demand adjustment in cooperative games and analyzes this model in weighted majority games. In the model, a randomly chosen player sets her demand to the highest possible value subject to the demands of other coalition members being satisfied. This basic process converges to the aspiration set. By introducing some perturbations into the process, we show that the set of separating aspirations, i.e., demand vectors in which no player is indispensable in order for other players to achieve their demands, is the one most resistant to mutations. We then apply the process to weighted majority games. We show that in symmetric majority games and in apex games, the unique separating aspiration is the unique stochastically stable one.

The unraveling prediction of disclosure theory relies on the idea that strategic forces lead firms (information senders) to voluntarily disclose information about the quality of their products provided the information disclosed is verifiable and the costs of disclosure are negligible. This theoretical prediction requires that consumers (information receivers) hold correct beliefs about non-disclosed information and, in equilibrium, treat all non-disclosed information with extreme skepticism. Previous research finds that receivers are insufficiently skeptical, or in other words are naive, about non-disclosed information, which leads to the failure of unraveling. This paper examines the extent to which naivety responds systematically to features of the decision environment, namely the availability of opportunities to communicate with others (Consultation treatment) and the context of the experimental setting (Context treatment, based on hygiene ratings). We find that complete unraveling fails to occur in all our treatments. Receiver's beliefs and guesses about non-disclosed information are similar across the Consultation and Context treatments relative to the Baseline implying that receivers are naive about non-disclosed information under naturalistic features that exist in field settings. We also find that senders are partly to blame for the lack of unraveling, as intermediate types would gain from disclosing more often given the observed receiver behavior.

In the financial economics literature debt contracts provide optimal solutions for addressing managerial moral hazard problems. We analyze a model with multiple projects where the manager obtains private information about their quality after the contract with investors is agreed. The likelihood of success of each project depends on both its quality and the level of effort exerted on it by the manager. We find distributions of the quality shock such that the optimal financial contract requires the investor to hold an equity claim. Our model addresses issues that are relevant for financial intermediation and corporate governance.