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This study analyzed a random sample of thirty-six collective bargaining contracts between teachers and their respective boards of education in Wisconsin, New York, Tennessee, and California. The contracts were studied to assess the effect that collective bargaining has had upon the powers of principals over time. This was done by comparing each contract to a comprehensive list of traditional powers that were available to principals prior to collective bargaining (Pre-Collective Bargaining Power Profile of Principals). This analysis of contracts was a two-phase process. The first step was to identify whether or not the profile statements in the Pre-Collective Bargaining Power Profile were referred to in each contract. The second step was to describe how the presence of references to these statements affected the Power Profile of Principals. The principal's power was reported as being affected in three ways: deleted, constrained, or authorized. The general conclusion of this study was that the effect of teacher collective bargaining upon the powers of principals has been marginal. The data from the analysis of the contracts revealed that the majority (66 percent) of the statements in the Pre-Collective Bargaining Power Profile were not referred to in the collective bargaining contracts. The effects of the references to the statements that were identified were mixed. In the role areas of personnel management, pupil personnel management, and instructional leadership, the negotiation process authorized more power to principals than it deleted. In the role area of business and plant management, the principals' powers were deleted much more than authorized. This was due solely to the inclusion into the contracts of two items (i.e., the power to control building space and the power to control who may and may not enter the building). In the role area of community relations, the frequency of references was so small that the effects upon the power of principals were nonexistent.

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I extend the Katz and Shapiro (1985) oligopoly model with network effects to encompass products with differing technological levels. I focus on a version of the model in which firms can invest in order to improve the probability that they advance their technology from a low level to a high level. I find that better available technology, lower adoption costs, and stronger network effects increase the rate of technological advancement and social welfare. Incompatible networks have lower total surplus but higher adoption rates. The investment competition dissipates to some degree the potential producer rents from successful advancement, particularly in the incompatible network case where increased competition can result in lower total welfare. A policy imposing a technology standard (via a high type technology requirement) yields the highest adoption rates, but negatively affects overall welfare. Analysis of the optimal tax/subsidy policy shows that taxes are optimal in most cases, since the private incentive to advance technology outweighs the social incentive. Negotiations in the real world can rarely be represented by a simple bargaining session between two parties. Agent bargaining, when one player represents another party in a bargaining situation for some form of compensation, is one such complicating circumstance from the real world. I explore the effects that this third entity has on the outcome of negotiations. I conduct a laboratory experiment emulating a simple example of agent bargaining. I test a hypothesis formulated using sequential-Nash-bargaining and also propose behavioral explanations for the observed behavior. I find that sequential-Nash-bargaining does a poor job of explaining our observations, and that using a weighted minimization of the differences between each of the three parties as a focal point provides a promising alternative.

Public sector corruption is endemic in many economies and is frequently cited as a cause of poor economic performance. Corruption hinders the completion of beneficial transactions and distorts the outcomes of economic policies. It can also affect the policy choices of governments as they attempt to counteract the consequences of corruption. Excessive inflation may be a negative side effect of corruption if the government compensates for lost revenue by increasing the rate of monetary expansion to exploit seigniorage. There is convincing empirical evidence from cross-section studies that inflation and corruption are positively correlated. It has been suggested that this is a consequence of governments in corrupt economies turning to the use of seigniorage as a method of raising revenue (Al-Marhubi, 2000). This seems a likely route through which the correlation can arise, but the mechanism at work has not received any theoretical attention. In particular, there has been no demonstration that an optimizing government will rationally exploit seigniorage as a response to corruption. The contribution of this study is an analysis of this issue in theoretical models in which the growth rate of money supply is chosen by an optimizing government. Although an empirical analysis is undertaken to explore the relationship between corruption and inflation in chapter one, the main focus of the study is on chapters three, four, and five where theoretical analysis plays the principal role in the research.

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Negotiated settlements, formal treaties to unilateral cease-fires, are often accepted to be the preferable method to end war. When negotiated agreements are used in the normal business of international politics they can be potentially helpful devices; however, when they are relied upon for a nation's security or war prevention and conclusion they can prove disastrous. It is the presence of force variables, and not the formality of an agreement which effectively concludes a war. I recategorize success of an agreement to not only mean failure of a return to war, but also whether the tenets of an agreement are actually followed. I utilize a modified version of Fortna's conflict dataset and run three separate logit analyses to test the effectiveness of settlements in a medium n quantitative analysis. If politicians and policy makers realize that it is not treaties that establish peace but the costs of war and military might then perhaps the world will be a more peaceful place.

Chen, Fengjiao. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 34-35). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1 / Chapter 2 --- Literature Review --- p.5 / Chapter 2.1 --- Wage Bargaining and Strike --- p.6 / Chapter 2.2 --- Outside Option --- p.7 / Chapter 3 --- The Model Setting --- p.9 / Chapter 4 --- Equilibrium Analysis --- p.12 / Chapter 4.1 --- Equilibrium when b < We --- p.12 / Chapter 4.2 --- Equilibrium when b = We --- p.13 / Chapter 4.3 --- Equilibrium when b > We --- p.15 / Chapter 4.4 --- Opting Out is an Equilibrium --- p.26 / Chapter 4.5 --- Implications on Preemption and Renegotiation --- p.27 / Chapter 5 --- Discussion --- p.28 / Chapter 5.1 --- Without Outside Option (HHFG Model) --- p.28 / Chapter 5.2 --- Committed to Strike (Shaked 1994) --- p.29 / Chapter 5.3 --- The Influence of discount factor 5 --- p.30 / Chapter 5.4 --- Equilibrium Refinement by Good Faith Bargaining Rule --- p.31 / Chapter 6 --- Conclusion --- p.32

Cette thèse consiste en quatre essais qui traitent de négociation et de réseaux en théorie des jeux noncoopérative. Le premier chapitre présente des jeux de négociations dans un contexte d’externalités. Le jeude négociation sur la digue traite d’une approche non coopérative d’un jeu d’investissement dans un contexted’externalités positives. Les incitations `a prendre part aux négociations se synthétisent en un ”jeude la poule mouillée”. Les résultats montrent qu’il est socialement plus efficace qu’un joueur intermédiairemène les négociations. Le problème de négociation sur la rivière est un jeu de négociation non coopératifsur l’utilisation de la ressource fluviale en présence d’externalités négatives. Il existe des analogies entre lessolutions obtenues dans les cas de l’ATS et de l”UTI. Le deuxième chapitre traite de la formation de réseauxde producteurs et de détaillants en présence d’externalités négatives lorsque les joueurs sont clairvoyantsde degré-K. Les résultats montrent que (i) un degré de clairvoyance relativement faible est suffisant pouratteindre la clairvoyance absolue ou infinie; (ii) les définitions habituelles de l’optimum ou de l’efficience neconviennent pas parfaitement `a un concept de stabilité ensembliste. (iii) S’il existe une correspondance transitiveentre la stabilité clairvoyante par paires et la stabilité clairvoyante de degré infini, alors l’ensemble stablepeut être efficient. Dans Attribution de la valeur entre joueurs clairvoyants dans le processus de formationde réseau. Il s’agit d’un chapitre théorique qui propose le concept de stabilité von Neumann-Morgensternavec négociation. Dans ce concept de solution, les ensembles de réseaux stables, ainsi qu’une répartitionégalitaire au sein des composants du réseau sont déterminés conjointement, et de manière endogène. Cedernier chapitre met en évidence les conditions nécessaires pour que les réseaux von Neumann-Morgensternavec négociation soient efficients. / The thesis consists in four essays that deal with bargaining and networks in non cooperative game theory.The first chapter introduce river bargaining games in the context of externalities. The seawall bargaininggame deals with a non cooperative approach of an investment game in a context of positive externalities.The main result shows that the positioning of the agents impacts their incentives to sit at the bargainingtable, leading to a chicken game. An intermediary player should lead the negotiations to improve the societalwelfare. In the River bargaining problem, a non cooperative bargaining on a flowing resource in the presenceof negative externalities. Results show that depending on the instigator of the bargaining sequences but thereare analogies between solutions under the ATS and the UTI principles. The second chapter deals with theformation of networks of manufacturers and retailers in the presence of negative externalities when playersare level-K farsighted. The results show that, (i) a relatively low level of farsightedness is sufficient to reachthe infinite level of farsightedness; (ii) usual definitions of optimality or efficiency find limitations when itcomes to be confronted to a set-based definition of stability. (iii) If there is transitive correspondence betweenthe pairwise farsighted stable set and the level-1 farsighted stable set, then this set is likely to be stronglyefficient. In Allocating value among farsighted players in network formation, we proposes the concept of avon Neumann-Morgenstern farsighted stable set with bargaining. Under this solution concept, the stablenetworks so as the componentwise egalitarian allocation rule emerge endogenously. This chapter providesnecessary conditions under which a von Neumann-Morgenstern farsighted stable set with bargaining sustainsthe strongly efficient networks.

Current research in multi-agent systems (MAS) has advanced to the development of open MAS, which are characterized by the heterogeneity of agents, free exit/entry and decentralized control. Conflicts of interest among agents are inevitable, and hence automated negotiation to resolve them is one of the promising solutions. This thesis studies three modifications on alternating-offer bargaining protocols for automated negotiation in open MAS. The long-term goal of this research is to design negotiation protocols which can be easily used by intelligent agents in accommodating their need in resolving their conflicts. In particular, we propose three modifications: allowing non-monotonic offers during the bargaining (non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol), allowing strategic delay (delay-based bargaining protocol), and allowing strategic ignorance to augment argumentation when the bargaining comprises argumentation (ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol). <p>Utility theory and decision-theoretic approaches are used in the theoretical analysis part, with an aim to prove the benefit of these three modifications in negotiation among myopic agents under uncertainty. Empirical studies by means of computer simulation are conducted in analyzing the cost and benefit of these modifications. Social agents, who use common human bargaining strategies, are the subjects of the simulation. <p>In general, we assume that agents are bounded rational with various degrees of belief and trust toward their opponents. In particular in the study of the non-monotonic-offers bargaining protocol, we assume that our agents have diminishing surplus. We further assume that our agents have increasing surplus in the study of delay-based bargaining protocol. And in the study of ignorance-based argumentation-based negotiation protocol, we assume that agents may have different knowledge and use different ontologies and reasoning engines. <p>Through theoretical analysis under various settings, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of agents expected surplus. And through simulation, we show the benefit of allowing these modifications in terms of social welfare (total surplus). Several implementation issues are then discussed, and their potential solutions in terms of some additional policies are proposed. Finally, we also suggest some future work which can potentially improve the reliability of these modifications.