Initial Offers and Outcomes in Wage Barganing: Who Wins?

The initial works council’s wage claim and the initial firm’s (counter)offer as well as the fraction of the disputed wages the works council is able to capture conditional on initial disagreement are analyzed on the basis of a Spanish sample of wage settlements. After a given initial wage claim, the system forces the firm either to accept it or to make a counteroffer prior to a fixed (unknown to the econometrician) and short deadline. In this context signaling models predict that the wage claim should try to screen the firm’s level of profitability, while the offer is expected to reveal little information. Both hypotheses are tested using the Spanish data set and neither is rejected. The analysis of the fraction of the disputed wages the workers get after initial disagreement provides further evidence in favour of signalling models since we find it is to both observed and private information as well as to conflicting activity variables. Moreover, conditional on covariates, for a number of sectors, we cannot reject the parties “split the difference” between both initial offers. Note this solution coincides with the Rubinstein’s (1982) wage, the solution for the complete information game.