We experimentally study unanimity and majority voting rules in multilateral bargaining environments with stochastic future surplus. In these settings, reaching agreement when expected future surplus is sufficiently higher than the current surplus is inefficient. Theoretically, such inefficiencies never arise under unanimity rule but can arise under majority rule as players try to avoid endogenous risk of being excluded from the winning coalitions in the future. We find strong support for this prediction both when the unanimity rule is predicted to lead to more delays, and when both rules should lead to identical levels of delays. We also find that there are more delays than predicted under the majority rule. Using data from conversations among the bargainers and the type of proposals that are implemented, we find that these deviations arise as a result of more egalitarian sharing than predicted by theory, and therefore, lower risk of being excluded from the winning coalitions in the future.
Authors
- Acknowledgements & Disclosure
- We are grateful to Nageeb Ali, Andrzej Baranski, Matt Elliott, Natalie Lee, Steve Lehrer, Salvatore Nunnari, Clemence Tricaud, and Christoph Vanberg for the helpful feedback. We also thank audiences at ETH Zurich, Heidelberg, 2021 NZAE Virtual PhD Workshop, Vanderbilt, Theory and Experiments 2022 (Center for Behavioral Institutional Design, NYUAD), UCLA, Padova, International Conference on Public Economic Theory (PET 2022). We benefited from thoughtful comments of referees and the editor. Eraslan gratefully acknowledges support from National Science Foundation under grant SES-1730636. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.3386/w30434
- Published in
- United States of America
