Involuntary unemployment in a bargaining model when capacity choice is a binding precommitment

A market is studied where prices are formed through a bilateral bargaining process. players on one side of the market have in an initial stage the option to incur at a cost a binding precommitment which may limit the possible number of trades. it is shown that such a set-up does not necessarily lead to market clearing. to solve the game a refinement of subgame perfection is used and under this extra requirement the sensitivity of bargaining behavior with respect to the specification of outside options is analysed.