Collaborative Research: Theory, Experiments and Empirical Methodology of Coalition Bargaining: An integrated Approach

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This project will work to integrate the existing theoretical, experimental and empirical work on coalitional bargaining. The PIs plan to create a methodological and substantive interaction between experimental and empirical work on bargaining behavior. They also want to extend theoretical, experimental, and empirical work on legislative bargaining to a broader range of policy issues. Previous work in this area has focued primarily on distributive situations in which individuals or groups argue over the division of a fixed amount of a good or resourse. Clearly, in the real world legislative and corporate committees bargain over non-distributional issues at least as much as they bargain over the division of a fixed amount of transferable resources. Moreover, group decision making processes involve variousdegrees of interaction between bargaining rules and voting rules, and hence both theories and experiments analyzing group decision making should reflect this interplay of institutions.This project aims to make a number of steps in these directions. The PIs will develop new theories and use laboratory experiments to test those theories with American students participants as well as Canadian legislators. Among the questions of interest are concerns about the causes and consequences of issue-by-issue bargaining versus simultaneous bargaining. A second important question is whether different bargaining rules will have different efficiency consequences. Finally, they will consider the effects of both bargaining and voting rules on the relative likelihood of public good provision versus pork barrel projects.The project is intrinsically interdisciplinary, since bargaining is important in any disciplineinterested in group decision making. For example, in American politics there is an enormous literature on committee structures, party loyalty, public good provisions versus distributive politics, log-rolling, and multi-dimensional negotiations among players with heterogeneous interests. The research results of the present project have the potential to result in substantial changes in how we look at analyze all of these topics. 1