Bilateral bargaining of heterogeneous groups—How significant are patient partners?

Although many real bargaining situations involve more than one person on each side of the bargaining table, much of the theoretical and experimental research concentrates on two single players. We study a simple extension: bilateral bargaining of four people (two two-person groups) with different patience. One might think that the outcome should depend only on the most patient members of each group. The impatient members agree anyway and are, hence, irrelevant. We find, however, that the less patient player has at least some impact on the outcome. As an explanation we suggest a decrease in uncertainty about responder behaviour if a group is clearly asymmetric.