Bargaining Strategies with Asymmetric Initiation and Termination

Two experimental studies of bilateral bargaining were conducted, and this paper reports findings related to differences in the conditions under which bargaining began and ended. Asymmetric initiation affected the way the subjects bargained, but not, on the average, the deals they struck. Asymmetric termination affected both bargaining behavior and deals. One surprising conclusion was that following a relatively simple configuration of bargaining strategies increased both one's probability of making a deal and one's benefits from the deal itself.