John Cadigan

A Citizen-Candidate Model with Sequential Elections

This article develops a citizen-candidate model with sequential elections. The model highlights the strategic considerations associated with the primary process, which hinge on the preferences of party members, in particular the party medians and the party boundaries. It is shown that although electoral competition leads to convergence in platforms, the primary process limits such convergence. Intuitively, this results from candidates having to please two different sets of citizens in successive races (party members in the primary and the electorate as a whole in the general election).

Contracts, Behavior, and the Land-Assembly Problem:An Experimental Study

We use multilateral bargaining experiments to examine how the order of bargaining (simultaneous or sequential) and the nature of contracts (contingent or non-contingent) affect the duration of bargaining, the efficiency of exchange, and the distribution of the surplus in a laboratory land-assembly game with one buyer and two sellers. While theory predicts an earnings advantage for the first seller when contracts are sequential and contingent, and for the second seller when contracts are sequential and non-contingent, we find that when a seller has an earnings advantage in the laboratory, it is the first seller to bargain in the non-contingent contract treatments. This result contradicts conventional wisdom and a common result from the land-assembly literature that it is advantageous to be the last seller to bargain, a so-called “holdout”. We also find evidence that sequential bargaining leads to more aggressive seller bargaining and greater bargaining delay than simultaneous bargaining, ceteris paribus, and that non-contingent contracts increase bargaining delay and the likelihood of failed agreements. The majority of sellers indicated a preference for being the first seller to bargain in all sequential bargaining treatments.

Institutions and information in multilateral bargaining experiments

Abstract This paper examines the behavior in multilateral bargaining experiments with alternating offers and asymmetric information. In all experiments, a single buyer has up to ten bargaining periods to purchase one unit of a good from each of two sellers. Treatments vary based on who makes the first offer (buyer or sellers), timing (consistent buyer-offer/sellers-demand or alternating), and information (buyer’s value and sellers’ costs are known or come from a uniform distribution). We find that actual bargaining outcomes are virtually identical when offers alternate, regardless of which player makes the first offer. We find that alternating offers reduce bargaining delay slightly compared to treatments in which one side or the other makes repeated take-it-or-leave-it offers. Finally, we find that incomplete information increases bargaining delay and the likelihood of failed agreements.