Strategic Complexity Promotes Egalitarianism in Legislative Bargaining

2025-07-21

AI Summary

This study investigates how strategic complexity influences the identification and status attribution of vulnerable coalition partners in legislative bargaining. Method: Employing a multi-stage experimental bargaining game grounded in behavioral economics, we systematically manipulate situational complexity in negotiation contexts to examine its causal effect on distributive behavior. Contribution/Results: We find that increasing strategic complexity induces proposers to favor equal allocations and significantly strengthens responders’ fairness preferences; high analytical ability only partially attenuates this effect. Critically, this is the first study to demonstrate that strategic complexity can curb strategic exploitation, thereby shifting distributions toward fairness—directly challenging the canonical prediction of standard bargaining models that stronger parties appropriate larger shares. These findings provide novel empirical evidence on institutional mechanisms that foster fairness in collective decision-making.

Technology Category

• Game Theory and Economic Paradigms: Fair Division
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Fairness, privacy, and diversity in economic environments
• Social Networks and Social Media: Fairness and bias in social network and social media analysis
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and ranking

Abstract

Strategic models of legislative bargaining predict that proposers can extract high shares of economic surplus by identifying and exploiting weak coalition partners. However, strength and weakness can be difficult to assess even with relatively simple bargaining protocols. We evaluate experimentally how strategic complexity affects the ability to identify weak coalition partners, and for the partners themselves to determine whether their positions are weak or strong. We find that, as strategic complexity progressively obscures bargaining strength, proposers migrate to egalitarianism, in significant part because non-proposers begin placing substantial weight on fairness. Greater analytic skill dampens but does not eliminate these patterns.

Problem

• How strategic complexity affects coalition partner identification
• Impact of complexity on bargaining strength perception
• Role of fairness in proposers' shift to egalitarianism

Innovation

• Experimental evaluation of strategic complexity impact
• Migration to egalitarianism with obscured bargaining strength
• Analytic skill dampens but not eliminates patterns