Proposal Rights and Political Power

Abstract

In a canonical model of sequential collective bargaining over a divisible good we show that equilibrium expected payoffs are not restricted by players' voting rights or their impatience. For all monotonic voting rules and discount factors, and for all divisions of the good among players, there exists a stationary proposal‐making rule such that this division represents players' expected payoffs in a Stationary Subgame Perfect Nash equilibrium in pure strategies. The result highlights the significance of proposal rights in determining political power in collective deliberations.