Strategic Complexity Promotes Egalitarianism in Legislative Bargaining

TL;DR

This paper experimentally investigates how increasing strategic complexity in legislative bargaining influences proposer behavior, revealing that higher complexity leads to more egalitarian outcomes due to fairness considerations, even among skilled participants.

Contribution

It demonstrates experimentally that greater strategic complexity promotes egalitarianism in bargaining by obscuring power, with fairness becoming a key factor even for analytically skilled players.

Findings

Higher strategic complexity leads to more egalitarian proposals.

Proposers shift towards fairness as complexity increases.

Analytic skill reduces but does not eliminate egalitarian shifts.

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.