The determinants of voting in multilateral bargaining games

Abstract

Models of multilateral bargaining predict that agents would vote solely based on the share they are offered and that their vote is determined by whether that share is at least as high as the continuation value (CV) of the game. The standard experiment investigating behavior in multilateral bargaining is not well designed to determine if that is the case. Our experiment makes three changes to the typical design: it introduces substantial variation in the CV (using a within-subjects design and varying the discount factor), it generates variability in offers using computer-generated offers while retaining the equilibrium of the original game, and it uses belief elicitation. These changes allow us to consider whether behavioral voting rules that are independent of the CV or factors besides one’s own share are important to voting decisions. We find that the main determinant of votes is the share one is offered, but that when offers are believed to come from another participant, a proposal is less likely to be approved if the proposer tries to take a lot for himself. Nonetheless, the equilibrium voting rule, which is based on the CV of the game organizes choices better than behavioral rules that are independent of the CV.