Bargaining

In the social sciences, bargaining or haggling is a type of negotiation in which the buyer and seller of a good or service debate the price or nature of a transaction.

Many people attribute it as a skill, but there remains no guarantee that the price put forth by the buyer would be acknowledged by the seller, resulting in losses of profit and even turnover in some cases.

A growth in the country's GDP Per Capita Income is bound to reduce both the ill-effects of bargaining and the unscrupulous practices undertaken by vendors at street markets.

[1] Bargaining has largely disappeared in parts of the world where retail stores with fixed prices are the most common place to purchase goods.

[2] On the other hand, in Thailand, haggling seems to be softer than the other countries due to Thai culture, in which people tend to be humble and avoiding of arguments.

The Chinese culture, by contrast, places a much higher value on taking time to build a business relationship before starting to create value or bargain.

[citation needed] Bargaining games refer to situations where two or more players must reach an agreement regarding how to distribute an object or monetary amount.

Examples of such situations include the bargaining involved in a labor union and the directors of a company negotiating wage increases, the dispute between two communities about the distribution of a common territory, or the conditions under which two countries agree on nuclear disarmament.

Nash [1950] defines a classical bargaining problem as being a set of joint allocations of utility, some of which correspond to what the players would obtain if they reach an agreement, and another that represents what they would get if they failed to do so.

A bargaining game for two players is defined as a pair (F,d) where F is the set of possible joint utility allocations (possible agreements), and d is the disagreement point.

Some of the most frequent axioms used in the building of bargaining solutions are efficiency, symmetry, independence of irrelevant alternatives, scalar invariance, monotonicity, etc.

[6] In some markets, such as those for automobiles and expensive electronic goods, firms post prices but are open to haggling with consumers.

Evolutionary computation methods have been designed for automated bargaining, and demonstrated efficient and effective for approximating Nash equilibrium.