Experimental analysis of impatience in bilateral and multilateral negotiations

We conduct unstructured bilateral and multilateral negotiations in a laboratory experiment, to assess whether bargainers’ impatience affects outcomes as predicted by structured models meant to represent less-structured naturally-occurring settings. For concreteness we consider a buyer who can make only one trade negotiating with one or two sellers, with impatience induced via time pressure: a bargainer receives their negotiated payoff only if agreement is reached before expiration of a randomly determined bargainer-specific time limit that is unknown to all bargainers. We find increasing the buyer’s impatience generally harms the buyer, supporting the predictions from standard bilateral models and from some multilateral models.