Sept. 28th, Charles Thomas, Ph.D. – An Alternating-Offers Model of Multilateral Negotiations

Dr. Charles Thomas, a guest of the IFREE/ESI Lecture SeriesAbstract: I modify a standard infinite-horizon alternating-offers model of bilateral negotiations to analyze multilateral negotiations, an exchange process in which a buyer attempts to purchase from one of several sellers offering potentially different amounts of surplus to be split.  Rival sellers constrain the terms of trade to the buyer’s benefit in some cases, but not in others.  I use the model to illustrate how the buyer’s choice of conducting procurement via multilateral negotiations or an auction is affected by factors including the number of sellers, the extent of uncertainty when making the choice, and costs of participating in the procurement process.

Bio: Dr. Charles J. Thomas conducts research in industrial organization, antitrust policy, and microeconomic theory.  He has held faculty positions at Clemson University and the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business.  After earning his Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton University, he worked for six years as an economist for the Federal Trade Commission, where for antitrust investigations and litigation he provided economic analyses of competition in several industries.  During his time at the FTC he held appointments as the Special Assistant to the Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Economics, and as a visiting research fellow at Harvard Law School.

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