This paper explores the prisoner’s dilemma that may result when workers and firms are involved in labour disputes and must decide whether to hire a lawyer to be represented at trial. Using a representative data set of labour disputes in the UK and a large population of French unfair dismissal...

We develop a model of strategic networks in order to analyze how trade unions will affect the stability and efficiency of R&D collaboration networks in an oligopolistic industry with three firms. Whenever firms settle wages, the complete network is always pairwise stable and the partially...

We examine settings - such as litigation, labor relations, or arming and war - in which players first make non-contractible up-front investments to improve their bargaining position and gain advantage for possible future conflict. Bargaining is efficient ex post, but we show that a player may...

We conduct dictator games in our artefactual field experiment with 11th and 12th grade students in New Delhi, India. We construct an economic status index based on household ownership of assets for our subjects. Using cut-offs from this index, we randomly match dictators to recipients who are...

One of the long-standing puzzles in economics is why wages do not fall sufficiently in recessions so as to avoid increases in unemployment. Put differently, if the competitive market wage declines, why don’t employers simply force their employees to accept lower wages as well? As an...

In the context of international bargaining, standard models predict that a shift in military power can cause preventive war because it changes the relative bargaining position between states. We find that shifts in military power are not the only cause of war under commitment problems and that...

Do the parties in a typical dispute face incentives similar to those in the classic prisoner's dilemma game? In this paper, we explore whether the costs and benefits of legal representation are such that each party seeks legal representation in the hope of exploiting the other party, while...

This note suggests variations to the baseline Nash cooperative solution that take into account the Kalai-Smorodinsky critique. One the one hand, a CES form of the maximand is proven to accommodate both the generalized two-person Nash and the Kalai-Smorodinsky - as other proportional - solutions...

This paper analyzes the implications of bilateral bargaining over wages and employment between a producer and a union representing a finite number of identical workers in a monetary macroeconomic model of the AS--AD type with government activity. Wages and aggregate employment levels are set...

We conduct multi-person one-shot ultimatum games that reflect important aspects of collective bargaining. In all treatments a proposer has to divide a pie among herself and two groups of three recipients each. She cannot discriminate within, but across groups. A committee with representatives...