We investigate the implications of product market imperfections on profit sharing, wage negotiation and equilibrium unemployment. The optimal profit share, which the firms use as a wage-moderating commitment device, is below the bargaining power of the trade union. Intensified product market...

We study ex post outsourcing of production in an imperfectly discriminating contest, interpreted here as a research tournament or a procurement contest for being awarded some production contract. We find that the possibility of outsourcing increases competition between the contestants, leading...

We propose a formal concept of the power of voice in the context of a simple model where individuals form groups and trade in competitive markets. Individuals use outside options in two different ways. Actual outside options reflect the possibility to exit or to join other existing groups....

The explicit or implicit protection of banks through government bail-out policies is a universal phenomenon. We analyze the competitive effects of such policies in two models with different degrees of transparency in the banking sector. Our main result is that the bail-out policy unambiguously...

Competition between parallel infrastructures incorporates opposing welfare effects. The gain from reduced deadweight loss might be out- weighed by the inefficient duplication of an existing infrastructure. Using data from broadband internet access for Western Europe 2000-2004, this paper...

This paper tests two hypotheses from the theory of elimination tournaments: (i) that uneven tournaments, where the contestants are ex ante heterogeneous, entail lower effort exertion; this is a prediction from agency theory that has not been tested empirically before; and (ii) whether incentives...

We consider an economy in which firms need to invest in capital before they can advertise a job, while applicants may have to compete for jobs. Our aim is to investigate how this competition affects the investment decisions of firms. Our first result shows that the economy always generates the...

By the well established tournament literature, incomplete information regarding the employees? productivity is essential for the rationalization of (efficiency-enhancing) tournaments. In this paper we propose an alternative rationalization of tournaments focusing on a fully informed principal...

We study the implications of product market competition and investment for price setting, wage bargaining and thereby for equilibrium unemployment in an economy with product and labour market imperfections. We show that intensified product market competition will reduce equilibrium unemployment,...

This paper is a contribution to the debate on policy complementarity in relation to deregulation in the product and labour markets. We develop a model of dynamic efficiency wages and monopolistic competition. Whereas most of the literature points toward the gains associated to an increase in...