Pivotal Buyers and Bargaining Position

Securing sales to a large buyer can be pivotal to a supplier's decision to produce. While conventional wisdom suggests that being pivotal improves a buyer's bargaining position, the opposite is shown in a multilateral bargaining model. If other buyers' payments fall short of costs, a pivotal buyer must cover the shortfall or forfeit consumption. This affords leverage that the supplier lacks when bargaining with non-pivotal buyers. The analysis illuminates contracting in markets with high fixed costs, such as cable television programming, motion pictures, and large-scale project finance, and has implications for the FCC's horizontal ownership limits on cable system operators.     

Collective Bargaining and Faculty Job Satisfaction

Estimates of the impact of union membership on job satisfaction suffer from nonrandom self‐selection of employees into unions. In this paper, we circumvent this problem by examining the impact on satisfaction of collective bargaining representation, rather than of union membership. We use a two‐stage technique that controls for nonrandom selection of faculty into institutions, and apply that to a panel of faculty at repeatedly observed four‐year universities. We find that bargaining agreements increase satisfaction with compensation but reduce satisfaction with faculty workload. Bargaining has no statistically measurable impact on overall job satisfaction or on faculty's satisfaction with their authority to make decisions regarding their instructional duties.     

Bilateral Bargaining with Externalities

This paper provides an analysis of a non‐cooperative pairwise bargaining game between agents in a network. We establish that there exists an equilibrium that generates a coalitional bargaining division of the reduced surplus that arises as a result of externalities between agents. That is, we provide a non‐cooperative justification for a cooperative division of a non‐cooperative surplus. The resulting division is related to the Myerson‐Shapley value with properties that are particularly useful and tractable in applications. We demonstrate this by examining buyer‐seller networks and vertical foreclosure.     

The Economics of Unions and Collective Bargaining

This paper reviews recent research on the economics of unions and collective bargaining, emphasizing the implications for human resource management. Research findings on the impact of unions, strategic union avoidance behavior by management, strategic use of labor law by unions and employers, and conflict and conflict resolution in labor relations are discussed. The paper highlights unexploited connections between research on unioun impact and research on strategic behavior.     

Firm Investment Behavior and Collective Bargaining Strategy

Using survey data on labor union coverage at the firm level, this paper examines union-nonunion differences in investment activity among 706 U.S. companies during the 1970s. Consistent with a model of union rent seeking, firm-level collective bargaining is associated with significantly lower physical capital and R&D investment, even after controlling for firm and industry characteristics. Deleterious union effects on investment are considerable throughout the 1972–80 period, but they vary across industries. Without significant changes in collective bargaining power or strategies, diminished investment activity by unionized companies is likely to exacerbate the already considerable decline in U.S. union coverage