How can trade unions act strategically?

How Trade Unions Increase Welfare

Historically, worker movements have played a crucial role in making workplaces safer. Firms traditionally oppose better health standards. According to our interpretation, workplace safety is costly for firms but increases the average health of workers and thereby the aggregate labour supply. A laissez-faire approach in which firms set safety standards is suboptimal as workers are not fully info...

Currency Unions and Trade: How Large is the Treatment Effect?∗

It has been conspicuously hard to empirically identify clear-cut effects of Þxed exchange rates and other monetary regimes on the real economy. This paucity of empirical Þndings has lead many academic economists as well as other observers to the view that radical monetary reform — such as the adoption of a common currency — might have limited economic consequences. For example, it probably expl...

Strategically Seeking Service: How Competition Can Generate Poisson Arrivals

W consider a simple game in which strategic agents select arrival times to a service facility. Agents find congestion costly and, hence, try to arrive when the system is underutilized. Working in discrete time, we characterize pure-strategy Nash equilibria for the case of ample service capacity. In this case, agents try to spread themselves out as much as possible and their self-interested acti...

Trade unions and development

Strategically knowing how

In this paper, we propose a single-agent logic of goal-directed knowing how extending the standard epistemic logic of knowing that with a new knowing how operator. The semantics of the new operator is based on the idea that knowing how to achieve φ means that there exists a (uniform) strategy such that the agent knows that it can make sure φ. We give an intuitive axiomatization of our logic and...