Especially in the first six months of his visit, Dr. Ozyurt spent significant amount of time and energy to meet and connect with mediation experts and practitioners for the purpose of better understanding of the theory and practice of mediation. For this reason, Dr. Ozyurt audited a course and a standard mediation training program at Harvard University Law school, participated several conferences, and met various experts and practitioners. At the same time, Dr. Ozyurt deepened his readings of various literature, including social psychology, law, and business on bargaining and mediation.
Dr. Ozyurt’s action plan since the beginning of the project had two components:
1) Dr. Ozyurt has studied four theoretical frameworks and got various interesting results. A more detailed explanation for these models and their results are attached in Part B of this report.
2) Dr. Ozyurt was aiming to do empirical research on mediation in the long run. After realizing the great need in the field, he devoted significant time and energy on training himself on empirical research. For this purpose, Dr. Ozyurt audited courses (econometrics and development economics) and trained himself for program evaluation, randomized controlled trial (RCT) experiments, and micro econometric analysis. Furthermore, with the intention that best way of learning is “learning by doing,” Dr. Ozyurt has started to work on a joint project with Asim Khawaja, a development economist at Harvard University Kennedy School.
A summary for Dr. Ozyurt’s theoretical and conceptual models on mediation and main results:
Dr. Ozyurt worked on two modelling settings under cardinal framework, negotiation with verifiable strength and cheap talk, but decided not to adopt these two setups for further exploration as explained in Part B.
Dr. Ozyurt studied an ordinal mechanism design framework where the mediator seeks a resolution over a single issue in which negotiators have diametrically opposed rankings over the alternatives. Each negotiator has private information about her own ranking of the outside option, e.g. the point beyond which the negotiator would rather take the case to a court proceeding. In this single mediation problem Dr. Ozyurt shows that there exist no efficient and dominant strategy implementable (DSI) mediation rules. However, there are efficient Bayesian inventive compatible (BIC) mediation rules with additional appealing properties if the negotiators’ utility functions are sufficiently concave (i.e. the negotiators are risk averse).
The only DSI mediation rule is a constant one, where the mediator always suggests the same alternative. On the other hand, split-the-difference rule, where the mediator always suggests the median alternative of the declared mutually acceptable outcomes, is a BIC mechanism. This rule is often used mechanism in bilateral negotiations. There are many other BIC mediation rules. However, split-the-difference rule is the only symmetric, monotonic and efficient Bayesian incentive compatible rule when the number of available alternatives is small. Dr Ozyurt extended this framework to multiple issues with a possibility result in dominant strategies. The extensive findings in this setup are collected as a publishable paper, which is coauthored with Onur Kesten from Carnegie Mellon University. The final version of the paper, which is attached in Part B, is submitted to Econometrica.
In the return phase of the project Dr. Ozyurt had the opportunity to present his project in various universities (18) and conferences (4), which attracted other economists' attention to the subject. Dr. Ozyurt also advised a masters thesis on mediation during this period. He also started three other projects on the subject (please see Part B for more details).
