Unions, bargaining and strikes (original) (raw)

Claim, offer and information in wage bargaining

A stylized private-information model on the determination of the initial works council claim and the initial firm (counter) offer is analyzed in the context of the Spanish Collective Bargaining system. The Spanish system forces agents to make initial offers at the beginning ot the negotiation process. Thus initial firm offers are expected to reveal very little information. Our findings confirm such a guess. Morever, we found that initial offers crucially depend on aggregate bargaining conditions, price expectations and those variables that reflect the characteristics of the negotiation unit. However, the latter set of variables enters differently in both offer equations.

Transparency Versus Back-Room Deals in Bargaining ( working title )

2014

We design an experiment to study the effects of transparency on bargaining processes. We show that whether transparency arrises endogenously depends on the degree of competition between subjects. In a competitive setting there is no transparency: subjects use private communication channels to compete for favors from those in power and establish back-room deals. In the absence of competition the bargaining process is transparent: subjects communicate publicly and outcomes are more egalitarian. We further show that in a competitive setting, imposing transparency by requiring all communication to be public reduces the observed competition between subjects and leads to more egalitarian outcomes.