The literature on pretrial dispute settlement has focused on the effect of first-order uncertainty on bargaining, while assuming common knowledge about higher-order beliefs. We study the effect of higher-order uncertainty and show that the existence of such uncertainty improves the efficiency of settlement bargaining by expanding the set of strategies implementable in the equilibrium. We introduce uncertainty about higher-order beliefs by assuming that one player privately observes an imperfect signal of the other player's type. We show that such signals could improve the efficiency only if they are privately observed: The signal's informational value disappears if it is publicly observable.

中文翻译：

---

具有二阶不确定性的争议解决

关于审前争端解决的文献集中于一阶不确定性对谈判的影响，同时假设了关于高阶信念的共同知识。我们研究了高阶不确定性的影响，并表明这种不确定性的存在通过扩展均衡中可实施的策略集来提高和解谈判的效率。我们通过假设一个玩家私下观察到另一个玩家类型的不完美信号来引入关于高阶信念的不确定性。我们表明，此类信号只有在私下观察时才能提高效率：如果可以公开观察，信号的信息价值就会消失。