Group Decision-Making and Voting in Ultimatum Bargaining: An Experimental Study

We conduct a laboratory study of the group-on group ultimatum bargaining with restricted within-group interaction. In this context, we concentrate on the effect of different within-group voting procedures on the bargaining outcomes. Our experimental observations can be summarized in two propositions. First, individual responder behavior across treatments does not show statistically significant variation across voting rules, implying that group decisions may be viewed as aggregations of independent individual decisions. Second, we observe that proposer behavior significantly depends (in the manner predicted by a simple model) on the within-group decision rule in force among the responders and is generally different from the proposer behavior in the one-on-one bargaining.