This dissertation examines the role of negotiations in different institutional settings. In chapter one, I study how voluntary disclosure of information affects outcomes in plea bargaining. A prosecutor negotiates a sentence with a defendant who is privately informed about whether he is guilty or innocent. During negotiations, the prosecutor can investigate for evidence regarding the defendant’s type. If prosecutor and defendant do not reach an agreement, they go to trial and obtain payoffs that depend on the prosecutor’s evidence. Voluntary disclosure gives rise to endogenous second-order belief uncertainty. A purely sentence-motivated prosecutor might disclose exculpatory evidence. Voluntary disclosure leads to inefficient outcomes as parties might fail to reach an agreement. Mandatory disclosure is socially preferable: there is always agreement, and the defendant is better off if he is innocent and worse off if he is guilty. Furthermore, the prosecutor is better off under mandatory disclosure.
In chapter two, I study how bargaining power affects bargaining outcomes between an entrepreneur and a venture capitalist who provides funds. Entrepreneur and venture capitalist openly disagree about noncontractible future decisions. The contract specifies control rights and cash-flow rights for each party. Noncontractible decisions are made by the party with control rights. When the entrepreneur has greater bargaining power and the investment value is large, she optimally relinquishes control rights. When the venture capitalist has more bargaining power, she always retains control rights. In general, greater disagreement makes the entrepreneur less likely to retain control rights.
In chapter three, I study a bilateral bargaining model with endogenous recognition probabilities and endogenous surplus. At each period, players exert two types of costly effort: productive effort, which increases the surplus size, and unproductive effort, which affects the probability of being recognized as the proposer. I characterize how differences in the cost of exerting efforts affects outcomes. Advantages in unproductive effort affect the provision of both types of effort, but advantages in productive effort only affect the provision of that effort. Differences in time preferences only affect productive efforts when the probability of recognition is not persistent.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/43157 |
| Date | 06 October 2021 |
| Creators | Cuellar Tapia, Pablo Francisco |
| Contributors | Ortner, Juan |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ |
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