At noon on October 14th, the first session of Noon Sunshine – Young Scholars Seminar was held in the Room 116 in the School of Finance as scheduled. The title of this session was the Consensus Bargaining Solution. The presenter was Xiangliang Li, who recently joined the School of Finance as an Assistant Professor. Xiangliang got his PhD degree in Economics from Yale University. His research fields include (cooperative and noncooperative) game theory, mechanism design, and international trade.

The seminar started with the introduction of Noon Sunshine – Young Scholars Seminar by Xu Han, the Party Secretary of the school, and Xiaoyun Fan, the Executive Vice President. They also expressed the school’s full support of young scholars’ research through many ways including building academic platforms like Noon Sunshine.

Then Dr. Li started his presentation with several motivating examples in game theory. The main part of his presentation was to propose two new bargaining solutions: the Consensus and Compromise solutions. In order to illustrate the differences of the two new solutions with the Nash solution, he decomposed Axiom IIA (Independent of Irrelevant Alternatives) of the Nash Solution into several sub-axioms, and gradually replaced two controversial ones in the axiomatization for the Consensus and Compromise solutions. The sub-axiom replaced with for the Consensus Solution says: when both players' utilities of no-cooperation become lower creating additional room for players to cooperate, then as long as options within the additional room are worse than the current solution, the solution shall not change. The sub-axiom replaced with for the Compromise Solution says: the solution shall not be the best for only one player. In the end of his presentation, Dr. Li discussed the relationship between cooperation and no-cooperation.

After Dr. Li’s presentation, Shenzhe Jiang, an Assistant Professor from the Institute of Structural Economics of Peking University, discussed Dr. Li’s work. Professor Jiang praised the innovation and importance of Li’s work---since game theory is an essential core of economics, the new solutions to Nash’s bargaining problem might have a big impact on different subfields of economics. He also gave several suggestions including empirically comparison of different bargaining solutions.

Finally, the seminar ended with Q&A.

Noon Sunshine, beginning at the foundation of the School of Finance, is a platform routinely held for academic communications. It aims at helping young scholars focus on frontier academic questions issues, enhancing academic communications, and developing cooperation in academic research.