Employee share ownership in a unionised duopoly

Profit sharing schemes have been analysed assuming Cournot competition and decentralised wage negotiations, and it has been found that firms share profits in equilibrium. This paper analyses a different remuneration system: employee share ownership. We find that whether firms choose to share ownership or not depends on both the type of competition in the product market and the way in which workers organise to negotiate wages. If wage setting is decentralised, under duopolistic Cournot competition both firms share ownership. If wage setting is centralised, only one firm shares ownership if the degree to which goods are substitutes takes an intermediate value; otherwise, the two firms share ownership. In this case, if the union sets the same wage for all workers neither firm shares ownership. Therefore, centralised wage setting discourages share ownership. Fi- nally, under Bertrand competition neither firm shares ownership regardless of how workers are organised to negotiate wages.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Tullock and Hirshleifer: a meeting of the minds

Rent-seeking, (Non-)deterministic contest, Contest success function, All-pay auction, Rent dissipation, Exclusion principle, Preemption effect, Cap, Campaign contributions, C72, D72, D44,

Stress levels of dominants reflect underlying conflicts with subordinates in a cooperatively breeding species.

16 pagesInternational audienceMaintaining dominance status had long been considered to be less stressful than subordination. However, no consistency in stress levels of dominant and subordinate individuals has been demonstrated. Tactics used to achieve and maintain dominance could be determinant. In cooperatively breeding species, conflicts between dominants and subordinates are expected since dominant individuals tend to monopolize reproduction while subordinates seldom reproduce. Reproductive skew models predict that subordinates’ reproductive opportunities are either allotted or subject to competition with dominants. In the former case, no policing of subordinates by dominants is expected. In the latter, dominant should exert a control over the subordinates possibly leading to higher stress levels in dominants than in subordinates, which could be further elevated as the number of potential competitors in the group increases. In the present study, we aimed to test these hypotheses by assessing individual’s stress level using the neutrophils to lymphocytes ratio (N:L) in a wild cooperatively breeding rodent, the Alpine marmot (Marmota marmota). We found that dominants exhibit higher N:L ratio than subordinates and that dominants’ N:L ratio increases with the number of unrelated same-sex subordinates in the group. We conclude that controlling unrelated subordinates is stressful for dominants, as expected under tug-of-war models. These stress patterns reveal conflicting relationships between dominants and subordinates over the reproduction and social status acquisition. This study highlights the influence of the nature, strength, and direction of conflicts on stress levels