This dissertation consists of two parts. The theme connecting the two parts is the role of uncertainty. The first part focuses on the role of uncertainty in cooperative bargaining and public decision making. I provide an axiomatic characterization of the normalized utilitarian solution to bargaining problems involving uncertainty. In addition to three basic axioms that are common in the bargaining literature, I propose the axiom of weak linearity to characterize the solution. In the second part I study uncertainty in non-cooperative games by designing a principal agent model of public bailouts. The first essay in this part sets up the model and shows that the moral hazard problem, namely the Samaritan's dilemma, exists without an altruistic principal. The second essay in this part builds upon the previous essay and focuses on the informational elements in a bailout game. Mainly, I show the existence of a separating equilibrium, where public bailouts serve as a mechanism to reveal essential information to outsiders and in which the good-type agents can benefit from rejecting a bailout offer.

Drawing on participatory knowledge creation, this thesis examines the diverse ways in which social capital of poor, rural women in Bangladesh serve as a “capacity of individuals to command scarce resources, by virtue of their membership in networks or broader social structures” (Portes 1995:120). It addresses how women’s capacity to command resources, needed for their livelihood and for a dignified life, is influenced by cultural practice, power and gender relations, which interplay within and around their networks. Women are represented as active participants who are shown to celebrate, adapt, sustain, negotiate and resist the circumstances of their lives. Women find space to manoeuvre in the situations they face, strategize in their dealings with various actors, and manipulate resources and constraints. The author argues that the social capital of women and the portfolio of bonding, bridging and linking relations that women have, or do not have, are keys to an understanding of the bargaining processes in their households and communities. Among the research participants, women’s ability to eventually change cultural practice, power- and gender relations depends upon whether women, individually or collectively, have a variety of bonding, bridging and linking relations to strengthen their bargaining power.

Following Chang, Lai, and Chang(1999), this report discusses the policy assignment problem with efficient wage-employment bargaining under perfect capital mobility. Whether it can rescue the default of proposed by Ramirez (1988) that coordinate between fiscal and exchange rate policies to achieve given desirable targets. The conclusion of this report is as follows¡G Under fixed exchange rates with perfect capital mobility, however, an appropriate mixture between monetary and fiscal policies can dynamically adjust to attain simultaneously the internal goal of desired output and the external goal of official foreign reserves. It's conclusion as the same as proposed by Lai, Chang, and Chu (1990). But more importantly, it can rescue the default of proposed by Ramirez (1988) that coordinate between fiscal and exchange rate policies to achieve given the internal and external goals. Accordingly, we can understand that efficient wage-employment bargaining in the labor market plays a curial role in assessing the assignment or policy instrument to targets. Furthmore, this report extends the analysis results under fixed exchange rates shifting to the system of a managed floating regime. It can find that the policy assignment can still achieve given desirable target. Consequently, this report provides further evidence that the efficient wage-employment bargaining is very important for assignment problem.

With the development of the Internet, people can communicate with each other much more easily. Consumers with similar needs can conduct a collective purchase with potential suppliers by the Internet. Currently, there are many web sites providing collective purchasing for consumers. However, these collective purchasing functions have not fully taken the advantages of the Internet for either consumers or suppliers.Therefore, the first purpose of this research is to explore the possible online collective purchasing models. Based on the number of suppliers and the number of products, six collective purchasing models and related algorithms have been proposed. Further, a comprehensive cybermediary system architecture for collective purchasing was described. Finally, a prototype is built to demonstrate how these collective purchasing models work.

Traditionally, group buying is a way to lower down the price due to the group based collective bargaining power. In the Internet age, because the Internet provides more efficient communication tools, it is much easier to recruit more participants to join the group buying to increase the bargaining power and then to lower down the buying price. Hence, in 1998, Mercata proposed an innovative website using group buying as its business model. Since then, there is more and more group buying websites with different group buying models. For single product group buying, there are two most often used models, price acceptance model and free pricing model. The purpose of this thesis is to probe the performance of these two models. First, whether there is difference between the final transaction volumes of these two models and how the difference will be intervened by different price level of product are explored. The next concern is to find what kinds of personal factors of participants will affect their choice of group buying model. The result is that the performance and participants¡¦ satisfaction of free pricing model are better than those of price acceptance model. In addition, the choice of group buying models will be influenced by the ideal price, group size expected by the participants and their motivations.

This study constructs a analytical framework in which the Labor Union has full bargaining power and firms are heterogeneous to analyze the economic effect for adjustment of minimum wage ratio. There are two features in this model. First, every firm shows heterogeneity in productivity and survivors of the market are only those with good productivity. Second, the labor union has sufficient power to bargain wage ratio. The main findings of this study include: 1. Increase in the minimum wage ratio raises the survival threshold and labor wage ratio, but decreases the numbers of firms. 2. Increase in the minimum wage ratio does not necessarily result in decrease of labor demand.

Univ., Diss.--Paris.

<p>Critiquing dyads as the unit of analysis in statistical work has become increasingly prominent; a number of scholars have demonstrated that ignoring the interdependencies and selection effects among dyads can bias our inference. My dissertation argues that the problem is even more serious. The bargaining model relies on the assumption that bargaining occurs between two states in isolation. When we relax this assumption one of the most crucial findings of these bargaining models vanishes: it is no longer irrational, even with complete information and an absence of commitment issues, for states to go to war. By accounting for the non-dyadic nature of interstate relations, we are better able to explain a number of empirical realities, and better able to predict when states will go to war.</p><p>In the first chapter of my dissertation I model a bargaining episode between three players and demonstrate its marked divergence from canonical bargaining models. In traditional two player bargaining models, it is irrational for states to go to war. I find this irrationality of war to be in part an artifact of limiting the focus to two players. In the model in chapter one, three states are bargaining over policy, and each state has a preference in relation to this policy. When these preferences diverge enough, it can become impossible for players to resolve their disputes peacefully. One implication of this model is that differences between two and three player bargaining is not just a difference in degree, but a difference in kind. The model in this chapter forms the core of the writing sample enclosed. Chapter two tests whether my own model is just an artifact of a particular set of assumptions. I extend the bargaining model to allow for N-players and modify the types of policies being bargained over, and I find that not only do the results hold, in many cases they are strengthened. The second chapter also changes chapter one's model so states are bargaining over resources rather than policy which results in a surprising finding: while we might expect states to be more willing to fight in defense of the homeland than over a policy, if more than two states are involved, it is in fact the disputes over territory that are significantly more peaceful.</p><p>In the final chapter of my dissertation, I attempt to apply the insights from the theoretical chapters to the study of interstate conflict and war. In particular, I compare a purely dyadic model of interstate crises to a model that accounts for non-dyadic interdependencies. The non-dyadic model that I present is an Additive and Multiplicative Effects Network model, and it substantially outperforms the traditional dyadic model, both in explaining the variance of the data and in predicting out of sample. By combining the theoretical work in the earlier chapters with the empirical work in the final chapter I can show that not only do dyadic models limit our ability to model the causes of conflict, but that by moving beyond the dyad we actually get notable gains in our ability to understand the world and make predictions.</p> / Dissertation

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