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TOPIC:
PATIENCE IS POWER: BARGAINING AND PAYOFF DELAY
ABSTRACT
We provide causal evidence that patience is a significant source of bargaining power. To do so, we first generalize the Rubinstein (1982) bargaining model to any positive discounting, maintaining only the assumption that preferences are dynamically consistent across bargaining rounds, and characterize the unique equilibrium. We then experimentally implement a version of this game, where bargaining delay is negligible (frequent offers), so that dynamic consistency holds by design, while bargainers nonetheless face significant payoff delay upon disagreement, and we induce different time preferences by randomly assigning individuals their own payoff delay profile (week or month per round, with or without front-end delay). Our leading treatment tests the prediction of a general patience advantage, independent of any details of discounting, which we strongly confirm. Additional treatments show that this advantage hinges on the presence of immediate payoffs and reject exponential discounting in favor of present-biased discounting.
Keywords:Alternating-Offers Bargaining, Time Preferences, Present Bias, Laboratory Experiments