GENDER DIFFERENCES IN EXPERIMENTAL WAGE NEGOTIATIONS

We examine behavioral gender differences and gender pairing effects in a laboratory experiment with face‐to‐face alternating‐offers wage bargaining. Our results suggest that gender differences in bargaining behavior are role‐dependent. We find that women obtain worse bargaining outcomes than men when they take on the role of employees, but not when they act as employers. Differences in bargaining outcomes can be explained by the bargaining parties' initial offers and counteroffers. We do not find evidence for behavioral differences between men and women in the process of alternating offers after first offers and counteroffers are made.(JEL J16, C78, C91)     

Voting rules and efficiency in one-dimensional bargaining games with endogenous protocol

We analyze a rent-seeking contest that determines the bargaining protocol in a one-dimensional bargaining game, where agents preferences over social outcomes are single-peaked. We relate the incentives of agents to make unproductive and costly efforts/investments to the quota rules that are required to implement agreements. When the contest assigns persistent recognition probabilities, we find that simple majority minimizes the total investments and, hence, inefficiency. In case that the contest recurs each period, multiple equilibria exist with the particularity that in each equilibrium only one agent controls the agenda of the bargaining process.     

“One Bite at the apple”: Legislative bargaining without replacement

To better understand the motivations behind the multilateral bargaining behaviors observed in the laboratory, I consider a modified many-player divide-the-dollar game in which players cannot propose again if they were randomly selected in one of the previous rounds but failed to provide an accepted proposal. This finite-horizon bargaining model without replacement captures the legislative process in which each legislator has only one opportunity to propose while the order of proposers is unknown. The unique symmetric subgame perfect equilibrium has several features that allow the transparent interpretation of experimental data. I find that proposers do not fully extract their rent, but the concern about inequity aversion is not a driving factor even in a myopic sense. Out-of-equilibrium observations suggest that retaliation and the fear thereof may be driving factors.     

Dividing Justly in Bargaining Problems with Claims

Theoretical research on claims problems has concentrated on normative properties and axiomatizations of solution concepts. We complement these analyses by empirical evidence on the predictability of three classical solution concepts in a bankruptcy problem. We examine both people’s impartial normative evaluations as well as their actual negotiation behavior in a bargaining with claims environment. We measure people’s judgments on the normative attractiveness of solution concepts with the help of a survey and also observe actual agreements in a bargaining experiment with real money at stake. We find that the proportional solution is the normatively most attractive rule, whereas actual negotiation agreements are closest to the ‘constrained equal-award’ solution.     

Efficiency in Marriage

Economists usually assume that bargaining in marriage leads to efficient outcomes. The most convincing rationale for this assumption is the belief that efficient allocations are likely to emerge from repeated interactions in stationary environments, and that marriage provides such an environment. This paper argues that when a current decision affects future bargaining power, inefficient outcomes are plausible. If the spouses could make binding commitments–in effect, commitments to refrain from exploiting the future bargaining advantage–then the inefficiency would disappear. But spouses seldom can make binding commitments regarding allocation within marriage.To investigate the efficiency of bargaining within marriage when choices affect future bargaining power, we consider the location decisions of two-earner couples. Initial location decisions are transparent and analytically tractable examples of choices likely to affect future bargaining power, but the logic of our analysis applies to many other decisions. For example, decisions about education, fertility, and labor force participation are also potential sources of inefficiency.     

ESTIMATING TIME‐VARYING BARGAINING POWER: A FISHERY APPLICATION

We propose an unobserved‐components‐inspired approach to estimate time‐varying bargaining power in bilateral bargaining frameworks. We apply the technique to an ex‐vessel fish market that changed management systems from a regulated open‐access system to an individual fishing quota (IFQ) system over the timespan analyzed. We find that post‐IFQ implementation fishers do improve their bargaining power and thus accrue more of the rents generated by the fishery. However, unlike previous studies, we find that fishers do not move to a point of complete rent extraction. Rather, fishers and processors appear to be in a near‐symmetric bargaining situation post‐IFQ implementation. (JEL C22, L11, Q22)     

Social Order and Plea Bargaining in the Courtroom*

The bureaucratic characteristics of the court process are examined as achievement-of face-to-face interactions in a courtroom where plea bargaining and other official and unofficial activities occur. Bargaining sessions are insulated from intrusion by standard practices which protect focused interactions. Defendants are “processed” not in any automatic way, but by carefully orchestrated lines of interaction, which render those defendants indistinguishable to judges and other observers. These features are due not to “overcrowding,” but to the way conduct is organized in the court. Defendants' contributions to the courtroom's social order are related to character assessment, a central activity in plea bargaining.     

“I Didn't Recognize It as a Bad Experience until I was Much Older”: Age,Experience, and Workers’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment

Analyzing interview data from 33 women and men, we examine how perceptions of sexual harassment are linked to age, experience, and historical context. Participants described workplace experiences from adolescence into their late twenties. Three themes emerged. First, as adolescents, respondents perceived some of the sexualized interactions they experienced at work as fun. Second, while participants did not define some of their early experiences as sexual harassment at the time, they do so today. Finally, participants suggested that prior work experiences changed their ideas about workplace interactions and themselves as workers. In sum, we find age is a fundamental dimension of power shaping individuals’ perceptions of sexualized interactions at work.     

Workers, Unions, and Takeovers

How do takeovers affect workers?? wages and job security in the short-run? What role does the labor union play in mitigating these effects? I answer these two questions by analyzing wage and employment outcomes of over 4,000 public firms that were acquired between 1981 and 2002, using establishment-level data from the U.S. Census Bureau. I find that target establishments exhibit a net contraction in wages and employment, relative to comparable establishments after takeovers. Targets?? establishments in more unionized industries experience worse wage and employment outcomes after takeovers. These adverse effects are exacerbated when the establishment is located in a state with Right-to-work laws where unions face a less favorable bargaining environment. These findings indicate that target firms?? employees are negatively affected by takeovers and that their labor unions do not mitigate these negative effects.     

“It’s Not My Fault!” Status,Attributions, and Perceptions of Injustice: The Case of Custodians and Teachers

Perceptions of injustice rely upon a sense-making process in which individuals attempt to understand why and how it occurs. We draw from the attribution-of-blame model of justice judgments to examine how two work groups of disparate status make sense of the treatment and outcomes engendered by their interactions. Data from 27 in-depth interviews with custodians and teachers reveal that when custodians perceive disrespect from teachers and teachers perceive that custodians do not fulfill properly their duties, their attributions are shaped by their status position. Although both make internal attributions to each other for their injustice, teachers do not recognize how they perpetrate injustice against custodians and custodians perceive greater injustice by identifying how external factors affect their performance and blame. This unjustified blame fosters counterproductive work behaviors, illustrating how interdependencies fuel a cycle of injustice. We discuss the implications of these findings for the school and justice processes.     

Reference dependent prices in bargaining: An experimental examination of precise first offers

Evidence from psychology and marketing suggests that those who make a “precise” first offer in bargaining get a better deal than those who make a “round” first offer. We report on a series of experiments designed to test for and improve our understanding of the “precise first offer” (PFO) effect in bargaining and whether it likely reflects rational optimizing or equilibrium behavior. Our experiment varies whether decisions are incentivized and whether the PFO effect can emerge as an equilibrium of a cheap-talk signaling game. We find evidence of a PFO effect when subjects read a vignette and make unincentivized individual decisions. When monetary incentives are added to the vignette, we still find the PFO effect, but it is not robust. In a bilateral bargaining situation with a cheap-talk equilibrium, we can not find the PFO effect, which is inconsistent with the equilibrium predictions. Moreover, the PFO effect reemerges in a setting in which initial offers are generated by a random device and thus provides a strong refutation of the signaling model. Our evidence suggests that optimizing and equilibrium accounts of the PFO effect are inadequate. Understanding initial offers as reference points, which subtly change perceptions about the kinds of acceptable counteroffers, provides a plausible account of a new finding on which prior explanations are silent: precise offers induce more precise counteroffers.     

Bargaining power and equilibrium consumption

We examine how a shift of bargaining power within households operating in a competitive market environment affects equilibrium allocation and welfare. If price effects are sufficiently small, then typically an individual benefits from an increase of bargaining power, necessarily to the detriment of others. If price effects are drastic, the welfare of all household members moves in the same direction when bargaining power shifts, at the expense (or for the benefit) of outside consumers. Typically a shift of bargaining power within a set of households also impacts upon other households. We show that each individual of a sociological group tends to benefit, if he can increase his bargaining power, but suffers if others in his group do the same.     

Cross-state variation in conceptions of quality of nursing facility long-term care for the elderly

We address two issues in this exploratory study. First, to what degree do variables prominent in explaining cross-state variation in the generosity of other public assistance programs also help to explain the resources states devote to nursing facility long-term care for the elderly, a service supported largely by states' Medicaid programs? Second, to what degree do the resources that states commit to this purpose influence the quality of state nursing facility processes and, in turn, translate into state nursing facility residents' quality-of-life outcomes? We find unusual features to the pattern of factors explaining state resource levels. We also find surprises in relations among the three aspects of quality, but overall, raising resource adequacy improves nursing facility process quality, which, in turn, bolsters nursing facility residents' quality-of-life outcomes. We close with suggestions for further improvement.     

Expectations,education, and opportunity

Using a long panel of youths, we establish a causal link between parental expectations regarding education and educational attainment. In particular, we use an instrumental variables approach to find that the child’s chances of obtaining a high school or college degree are increasing in the parent’s expectations of the likelihood of these events. We then use differences between the objective likelihood of a child’s educational attainment and the parents’ subjective probabilities to consider the hypothesis that lower educational outcomes among certain groups are driven by a “culture of despair,” where children are low-achieving because they are expected to underachieve. While we do find that children from households with lower levels of income, wealth, and parental education are less likely to attain high school and college degrees, we reject the hypothesis that this is driven by low subjective expectations of educational success. Rather, we find that parents from disadvantaged groups have expectations for the educational outcomes of their children that differ more from the statistical likelihood of these outcomes than do parents of children from advantaged households. That is, we find that parents in more disadvantaged households are more optimistic about the educational outcomes of their children than those from more advantaged households.     

Explaining the Mexican‐American Health Paradox Using Selectivity Effects

While typically socioeconomically disadvantaged, Mexican migrants in the United States tend to have better health outcomes than non‐Hispanic whites. This phenomenon is known as the “Hispanic health paradox.” Using data from Mexico and the United States, we examine several health outcomes for non‐Hispanic whites and Mexicans in the United States and in Mexico and employ Blinder–Oaxaca decompositions to help explain the paradox. We find evidence that selectivity is playing a significant role in the relatively healthy status of Mexican migrants in the United States. More importantly, there is evidence that health selectivity is a complex process and its effects typically do not work the same way for different health conditions and across genders. We also find evidence that some of migrants' health advantages are lost as they spend more time in the United States.     

The Rhetoric of Sociological Facts1

To develop inductively a preliminary list of rhetorical tools that sociologists use in their presentation of facts, we examine three general claims that are widely accepted as having been demonstrated empirically in the field of social movements: social networks are necessary for recruitment of new members; individual mental traits do not matter; and political opportunities are necessary for movement emergence. We identify eight rhetorical tools that helped promulgate these claims as facts. We all use techniques like these, but awareness about them can help us evaluate our arguments and find better ways to test them.     

Reward the lucky? An experimental investigation of the impact of agency and luck on bonuses

We examine the impact of agency and luck on bonuses in a two player, two stage controlled laboratory experiment. In the first stage, Player A makes an investment decision on behalf of Player B. In the second stage, Player B makes a dictator allocation for each possible outcome from the investment. We compare dictator giving (bonuses) across outcomes and with a control treatment in which the stage 1 outcomes are determined randomly. We do not find that luck is rewarded with higher bonuses. However, we do find a general tendency to respond to agency with reduced bonuses and, in particular, a significant tendency to reduce bonuses to agents who are unlucky. Additionally, we find that those who are more risk tolerant are less likely to give no bonus under agency but not in the control.     

An ordered choice model of promotion rules

This paper continues an important but short line of research investigating non-pecuniary outcomes of collective bargaining. These outcomes define the rules governing the employment relationship. The determinants of one of the most important of these rules — the one that governs the intrafirm allocation of labor — are analyzed. Specifically, micro-level data are used to estimate the determinants of promotion rules in major collective bargaining agreements in U.S. manufacturing. A multinomial choice model is estimated once these rules have been ordered along the joint dimension of increasing weight attached to seniority across a broadening seniority unit. The evidence suggests that contracts involving small, capital-intensive firms, whose technologies value specific training, in single-employer bargaining units, that contain an increasing proportion of men, are most likely to exhibit promotion rules that heavily weight company-wide seniority. This paper has greatly benefited from the comments of Cynthia Gramm, Wallace Hendricks, Jan Ondrich, Michael Wasylenko, and the participants in workshops at The Metropolitan Studies Program, Syracuse University, and at The New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, and from an anonymous referee. Excellent research assistance was provided by Sally Wallace. The usual disclaimer applies.