Essays in cooperative game theory, with applications to hold-up in co-ownership, bargaining, and multi-person utility.

摘要

The dissertation contains three essays. In " "Justice Delayed is Justice Denied:" A Cooperative Game Theoretic Analysis to Hold-up in Co-ownership," we consider an indivisible asset in which one owner, B, holds essentially 100% of the asset whereas the other, s, by virtue of ownership, has the legal right to block the sale of the asset. Apart from negotiation, B's only remedy is to seek a legal partition. The paper applies Nash's rational threats bargaining theory to predict a possible agreement between B and s. Our analysis includes risk averse agents, stochastic time until the legal resolution of the partition, more than one small owner, and Poisson arrival of offers.; In "Bargaining in the Presence of a Search Option: The Impact of the Buyer's Future Availability," we study an environment where, in negotiating the sale of an asset, the seller S's outside option is to sell the asset via search and the buyer B's outside option is to walk away. When informational frictions force S to use an actual offer, rather than the expected return to search, as her outside option, enormous changes in the dynamics and outcome ensue: sale of the asset ceases to be instantaneous and S might solicit several offers prior to sale. Both the payoffs and the probability that the sale is made to B depend crucially on B's future availability to purchase the asset.; In "Multi-person Utility," we approach the problem of preference aggregation by endowing coalitions with incomplete preferences. Consistency across coalitions comes in the form of the Extended Pareto Rule (EPR): if two disjoint coalitions A and B prefer x to y, then so does the coalition A union B. Assuming complete pair agreements, we discover that EPR imposes a "no arbitrage" condition in the terms of utility comparison between pairs. Provided certain non-degeneracy conditions, if all the pairs have complete preferences, then EPR implies that all the coalitions also have complete preferences. The group utility is a weighted sum of individual utilities, with the n-1 independent weights obtained from n-1 pair agreements forming a spanning tree in the group.