Strikes and Delays in Wage Bargaining: Theory and Data

本研究的目的是开发并实证检验适用于工会合同谈判的策略议价模型。这项工作遵循了最近在非合作议价理论中对议价效率低下和过程的理解的发展。效率低下，如罢工和其他代价高昂的延误，通常是由于对达成协议至关重要的某些方面的信息不完整。检验这些模型的有效性是很重要的，而劳资谈判为这种检验提供了一个自然而重要的领域。在大多数情况下，实证工作忽略了延迟选项，只关注罢工。这项工作将填补这一空白——初步分析表明，事实上，无论合同期限长短或谈判成本的大小，延迟的信号作用可能与罢工的作用一样重要。本研究将发展的非合作议价模型包括几个制度特征：罢工或延迟和有限期限合同。测试这些模型的预测将涉及6000份合同谈判的数据集。

The aim of this project is to develop and empirically test strategic bargaining models applied to union contract negotiations. This work follows the recent developments in the understanding of bargaining inefficiencies and processes in noncooperative bargaining theory. Inefficiencies such as strikes and other costly delays are usually explained by incomplete information about some aspect critical to reaching agreement. It is important to test the validity of such models, and labor negotiations provide a natural and important area for such tests. For the most part, empirical work has ignored the delay option, focusing solely on strikes. This work will fill that gap -- preliminary analyses show that in fact, the signaling role of delay may be just as important as the role of strikes, regardless of the duration of the contract or the magnitude of the bargaining costs. The noncooperative bargaining models that will be developed in this research include several institutional features: strike or delay and finite duration contracts. Testing the predictions of the models will involve a data set on negotiations with 6,000 contracts.