ABSTRACT
Traditional economic theory predicts with fair precision where sale prices will be in competitive markets, that is, where many buyers and sellers face one another to make trades concerning quantities of a reasonably homogeneous product. Political scientists and anthropologists have occasion to study bargaining in a wide variety of organizational and cultural settings. Despite the complexity of variables that may apply, it appears likely that a basic bilateral bargaining model should be applicable across a wide variety of types of exchanges. Theoretical discussions about the bargaining problem have been more common than empirical tests of the various models. There have been some studies desiped to test one or another of these models--more for the Nash model than the others, since it has received more and longer attention. What seems more plausible is to accept that the models are abstractions, but abstractions whose usefulness derives from their ability to mirror, and predict, bargaining behavior.
