- 期刊
How to Bargain: An Interval Approach
並列摘要
In many real-life situations, we need to bargain. What is the best bargaining strategy? If you are already in a negotiating process, your previous offer was α, the seller's last offer was (average)α＞α, what next offer α should you make? A usual commonsense recommendation is to ”split the difference,” i.e., to offer α=(α+(average)α)/2, or, more generally, to offer a linear combination α=k⋅(average)α+(1-k)•α (for some parameter k ∈ (0, 1)). The bargaining problem falls under the scope of the theory of cooperative games. In cooperative games, there are many reasonable solution concepts. Some of these solution concepts-like Nash's bargaining solution that recommends maximizing the product of utility gains-lead to offers that linearly depend on α and (average)α; other concepts lead to non-linear dependence. From the practical viewpoint, it is desirable to come up with a recommendation that would not depend on a specific selection of the solution concept-and on specific difficult-to-verify assumptions about the utility function etc. In this paper, we deliver such a recommendation: specifically, we show that under reasonable assumption, we should always select an offer that linearly depends on α and (average)α.