Bargaining problem

The two-person bargaining problem studies how two agents share a surplus that they can jointly generate. It is in essence a payoff selection problem. In many cases, the surplus created by the two players can be shared in many ways, forcing the players to negotiate which division of payoffs to choose. There are two typical approaches to the bargaining problem. The normative approach studies how the surplus should be shared. It formulates appealing axioms that the solution to a bargaining problem should satisfy. The positive approach answers the question how the surplus will be shared. Under the positive approach, the bargaining procedure is modeled in detail as a non-cooperative game. The two-person bargaining problem studies how two agents share a surplus that they can jointly generate. It is in essence a payoff selection problem. In many cases, the surplus created by the two players can be shared in many ways, forcing the players to negotiate which division of payoffs to choose. There are two typical approaches to the bargaining problem. The normative approach studies how the surplus should be shared. It formulates appealing axioms that the solution to a bargaining problem should satisfy. The positive approach answers the question how the surplus will be shared. Under the positive approach, the bargaining procedure is modeled in detail as a non-cooperative game. The Nash bargaining solution is the unique solution to a two-person bargaining problem that satisfies the axioms of scale invariance, symmetry, efficiency, and independence of irrelevant alternatives.According to Walker, Nash's bargaining solution was shown by John Harsanyi to be the same as Zeuthen's solution of the bargaining problem.