Bargaining in Legislatures: A New Donation Paradox

Montero, Maria

Abstract

It is well known that being the proposer or agenda setter is advantagenous in many collective decision making situations. In the canonical model of distributive bargaining (Baron and Ferejon, 1989), proposers are certain of being part of the coalition that forms, and, conditional on being in the coalition, a player receives more as a proposer than as a coalition partner. In this paper I show that it is possible for a party to donate part of its proposing probability to another party and be better off as a result. This appears paradoxical, even more so since the recipient never includes the donor in its proposals. The example shows that, even though actually being selected to propose is always valuable ex post, having a higher probability of being proposer may be harmful.

Citation

Montero, M. (2023). Bargaining in Legislatures: A New Donation Paradox. In S. Kurz, N. Maaser, & A. Mayer (Eds.), Advances in Collective Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for the 21st Century (159-171). Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21696-1_10

• Acceptance Date: May 10, 2022
• Online Publication Date: May 5, 2023
• Publication Date: May 5, 2023
• Deposit Date: Aug 8, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: May 6, 2025
• Publisher: Springer
• Pages: 159-171
• Series Title: Studies in Choice and Welfare
• Series ISSN: 2197-8530
• Book Title: Advances in Collective Decision Making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives for the 21st Century
• ISBN: 978-3-031-21695-4
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21696-1_10
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/9898569
• Publisher URL: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-21696-1_10
• Related Public URLs: https://link.springer.com/book/9783031216954
• Additional Information: First Online: 5 May 2023