Characterizing the Nash and Raiffa Bargaining Solutions by Disagreement Point Axioms

Abstract

We provide a new characterization of the n-person Nash bargaining solutions which does not involve Nash's Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives axiom, but mainly uses axioms which concern changes in the disagreement point and leave the feasible set fixed. The main axiom requires a convex combination of a disagreement point and the corresponding solution point to give rise to that same solution point. Further, we describe how the disagreement point approach can be applied to other bargaining solutions. The main result of the latter part is a first characterization of the so-called Continuous Raiffa solution.