Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2013, Volume 81, Issue 4

Gambling Reputation: Repeated Bargaining With Outside Options

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA9200
p. 1601-1672

Jihong Lee, Qingmin Liu

We study the role of incomplete information and outside options in determining bargaining postures and surplus division in repeated bargaining between a long‐run player and a sequence of short‐run players. The outside option is not only a disagreement point, but reveals information privately held by the long‐run player. In equilibrium, the uninformed short‐run players' offers do not always respond to changes in reputation and the informed long‐run player's payoffs are discontinuous. The long‐run player invokes inefficient random outside options repeatedly to build reputation to a level where the subsequent short‐run players succumb to his extraction of a larger payoff, but he also runs the risk of losing reputation and relinquishing bargaining power. We investigate equilibrium properties when the discount factor goes to 1 and when the informativeness of outside options diffuses. In both cases, bargaining outcomes become more inefficient and the limit reputation‐building probabilities are interior.


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Supplement to "Gambling Reputation: Repeated Bargaining with Outside Options"

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