14 January 2014In this paper, we consider a model of multilateral bargaining where homogeneous agents may exert effort before negotiations in order to influence their chances of becoming the proposer. Effort levels have a permanent effect on the recognition process (persistent recognition). We prove three main results. First, voting rules are equivalent (that is, they yield the same social cost) when recognition becomes persistent. Secondly, an equilibrium may fail to exist, because players may have more incentives to reduce their effort level (in order to be included in winning coalitions) than to increase it (in order to increase their proposal power). Thirdly,we prove that the existence problem is driven by the intensity of competition at the recognition stage. Another definition of this process enables to fix this problem.