Profit sharing regulation and repeated bargaining with a shut-down option

We analyze the behavior of a firm where workers share profits with shareholders by using a model cast in an Aoki framework. There are two sorts of uncertainties: one relates to the market price, assumed to follow a random path in continuous time, while the other concerns internal organization, i.e. the share of profits to be distributed between workers and shareholders. In the institutional setting we adopt the firm is flexible, since it has the possibility of shutting down, by paying laid off workers a bonus, which represents a sunk cost. The distributive share is determined in the firm's internal labor market through a bargaining that takes place at two occasions: at the beginning of the firm's life and when profits reach a threshold level. The second bargaining is endogenized according to a procedure imposed upon shareholders and workers by a regulator who may use profit distribution as a way to intervene in the firm's internal labor market. Specificities make this market highly imperfect. Different share parameter patterns result, owing to a shut down option, according to whether (a) the regulator calls for renegotiation when profits are increasing or decreasing, (b) the regulator's rule is announced in advance or is discretionally set.