Noncooperative Bargaining Models

Classical game theory makes a fundamental distinction between cooperative and non-cooperative games. This distinction was first proposed by Nash [1950a, 1951], who defined cooperative games as games permitting both communication and enforceable agreements between the players, and defined noncooperative games as games permitting neither communication nor enforceable agreements. Later writers have found these definitions unsatisfactory because any two-way classification based on two different criteria at the same time is always logically problematic since it immediately poses the question, What about objects possessing the first property but lacking the second, and what about objects possessing the second property but lacking the first? [cf. Harsanyi, 1976, 100-105.]