Bargaining Under the Illusion of Transparency
39 Pages Posted: 17 Feb 2015
Date Written: February 2015
Abstract
An uninformed seller offers an object to a privately informed buyer. The buyer projects information and exaggerates the probability that the seller is informed. Letting the buyer bargain and name her own price raises the seller's payoff above the full-commitment payoff. Under seller-offer bargaining, any positive degree of projection implies a full reversal of the Coasian result in stationary strategies. As delay between offers decreases, the seller raises his initial price and, in the limit, extracts the full surplus from trade. Dynamic bargaining without price-commitment is revenue-optimal. Existing experimental evidence is consistent with the comparative static predictions of the model.
Keywords: Bargaining, Coase Conjecture., Information Projection, Pricing
JEL Classification: C79, D03
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation