The main objective of this research project is to understand how people negotiate and what aspects of the situation they use as an aid to reach an agreement. Any aspect of a bargaining situation that helps bargainers to coordinate their expectations and behaviour so as to reach an agreement is called a 'focal point'. The purpose of this research is to extend our knowledge about focal points in bargaining situations. There are two sub-projects: In some bargaining situations, such as the division of land, allocation of mineral deposits or oil fields, or the division of an inheritance, there may be no division of the valuable resource that equates money earnings and there may be no equitable outcome. What aspects, if any, become focal in such situations? In many bargaining situations negotiators are not sure about how much others stand to gain from any given agreement. How does the absence of such information influence the focality of various divisions of the resource? Real bargaining situations are complex and it is difficult to find 'clean' data that allows one to isolate the role of particular factors on the observed bargaining behaviour. We shall therefore use lab experiments. This allows us to isolate the role played by a variable of interest while controlling for the influence of other potential factors.

Experimental data from lab experiments. Detailed methods information is available in the associated publications.