We consider a three-stage game to examine how market integration affects firms’ incentives to provide general worker training. In stage 1, firms invest in productivity-enhancing training. In stage 2, they can make wage offers for each others’ workers. Finally, Cournot competition takes...

It will be shown that for rational players with a sufficiently large time horizon it is advantageous to keep promises and not to cheat even if cheating is the optimal behaviour in the short run. This explains why ethics could develop in a market economy where incentives to cheat are ubiquitous.