Behavioral Economics Commons^™

Dynamic Bargaining With Transaction Costs, Peter Cramton

Peter Cramton

A buyer and seller alternate making offers until an offer is accepted or someone terminates negotiations. The seller's valuation is common knowledge, but the buyer's valuation is known only by the buyer. Impatience to reach an agreement comes from two sources: the traders discount future payoffs and there are transaction costs of bargaining. Equilibrium behavior involves either immediate trade, delayed trade, or immediate termination, depending on the size of the gains from trade and the relative bargaining costs. This contrasts with the pure discounting model where termination never occurs, and the pure transaction cost model where delayed trade never occurs.

Shrewd Bargaining On The Moral Frontier: Toward A Theory Of Morality In Practice, Peter Cramton, J Gregory Dees

Peter Cramton

From a traditional moral point of view, business practitioners often seem overly concerned about the behavior of their peers in deciding how they ought to act. We propose to account for this concern by introducing a mutual trust perspective, where moral obligations are grounded in a sense of trust that others will abide by the same rules. When grounds for trust are absent, the obligation is weakened. We illustrate this perspective by examining the widespread ambivalence with regard to deception about one’s settlement preferences in negotiation. On an abstract level, such deception generally seems undesirable, though in many individual cases …

Sun Spots And Expectations: W. S. Jevons And The Theory Of Economic Fluctuations, Sandra J. Peart

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

W. Stanley Jevon’s statistical study of periodicity has received much scrutiny (Aldrich1987), but less attention has been given to his theoretical position on economic fluctuations, a circumstance which T.W. Hutchison justly finds surprising considering that “Jevons maintained that aggregate instability, and the distress it caused, presented profoundly serious problems, and devoted some of his most strenuous economic research to their explanation” (Hutchison 1988, p. 6). This paper takes up the challenge to examine the development of Jevon’s though on economic fluctuations from the early 1860s until his death in 1882.

I shall distinguish in what follows between Jevon’s “theory of …

Using Auction Theory To Inform Takeover Regulation, Peter Cramton, Alan Schwartz

Peter Cramton

This paper focuses on certain mechanisms that govern the sale of corporate assets. Under Delaware law, when a potential acquirer makes a serious bid for a target, the target’s Board of Directors is required to act as would "auctioneers charged with getting the best price for the stock-holders at a sale of the company.’’ The Delaware courts’ preference for auctions follows from two premises. First, a firm’s managers should maximize the value of their shareholders’ investment in the company. Second, auctions maximize shareholder returns. The two premises together imply that a target’s board should conduct an auction when at least …