The Use of Bargaining Games in Local Development Policy

ABSTRACT Granting location incentives is a common city policy to attract new businesses, despite the frequent belief that the benefits are too generous. Can cities do a better job determining when to agree to these concessions and when to refuse? I argue that analyzing the concession decision with a simple bargaining game illustrates: (1) that the negotiation strategy a city uses should be based on the characteristics of the firm in each case and (2) that even poor cities with few attractive location features can avoid making large concessions. Development experiences in Miami‐Dade are used to illustrate the model.