All in good time

Abstract

Why is issue-by-issue bargaining a common phenomenon, even though it disallows the beneficial trade-offs across issues that are possible when negotiating a global solution? We show that under asymmetric information, issue-by-issue bargaining has two attractive features. First, it avoids bundling a good deal on one issue with a bad deal on another issue, when the lack of gains to agreement on the latter is not a priori common knowledge. Second, it avoids the imposition of the asymmetric information inefficiency of >harder> issues on issues which turn to be >easier> to solve. That's why when the agenda is not imposed on the parties but is rather left for them to determine when negotiating, they may very well opt for issue-by-issue bargaining. We demonstrate this in a natural game where bargainers communicate, whenever they choose to do so, their willingness to discuss or make offers either on one of the issues or on a bundle of issues. © 2007 Springer Verlag.