The EU as a global negotiator? The advancement of the EU’s role in multilateral negotiations at the UN General Assembly

This paper aims to account for the EU’s role in multilateral negotiations at the UNGA by looking at the negotiations on the enhanced observer status. During the negotiation process, the EU experienced significant opposition and had to accept an intermediate setback in form of a postponement of the vote. Despite this, the EU’s enhanced observer status was adopted by the UNGA in May 2011 as resolution 65/276. This research contributes to the understanding of the EU as an actor in multilateral negotiations and the interaction between state and non-state actors. I argue that the EU is in the process of establishing itself as an active and recognized actor at the UN and determining its role as a highly integrated regional organization and non-state entity in the state-centric environment of the UNGA. I analyse the negotiation process and the final agreement through the lenses of a bargaining approach and as an alternative, mutual recognition as global justice.

Modeling household relocation choice: An egalitarian bargaining approach and a comparative study

Accompanying the rapid urban expansion and fast population growth is a progressive trend of residential relocation in developing countries, which necessitates a thorough understanding of households’ relocation decisions. Previous studies generally treated home relocation as an individual or unitary household decision, ignoring the interactive and collaborative decision-making mechanisms that household members may adopt when making group decisions. In view of this research gap, this study examines the feasibility of applying the egalitarian bargaining approach to simulating households’ group decisions concerning residential relocation and further compares its performance with the Nash bargaining and the conventional utilitarian approach. Moreover, the study experiments with the possibility of accommodating three possible group decision-making mechanisms using the latent class modeling framework. The proposed modeling approaches are applied to an empirical case study in Beijing. Results show that models based on the egalitarian and Nash bargaining principles have better model fits than the utilitarian principle, suggesting the importance of considering egalitarianism when modeling household members’ collaborative choice on residential relocation. Moreover, the model based on Nash bargaining has the best model fit, indicating that instead of merely seeking egalitarianism or utilitarianism, household members are more likely to strike a balance between fairness and efficiency.

Characterizing NTU-bankruptcy rules using bargaining axioms

This paper takes an axiomatic bargaining approach to bankruptcy problems with nontransferable utility, by using properties from bargaining theory in order to characterize bankruptcy rules. In particular, we derive new axiomatic characterizations of the proportional rule, the truncated proportional rule, and the constrained relative equal awards rule, using properties which concern changes in the estate or in the claims.