ABSTRACT
The previous chapter investigated the formation of bargaining targets in the context of disputes between labour and capital, between trades unions and employers. It turned on the idea that, in forming targets and determining the relative bargaining power of each side, worker mobilisation and solidarity was crucial. What it did not do was to offer a model, an analytical explanation, of why actual conflict occurs. Come to think of it, it is one thing to model the bargaining power of a union or of the firm’s management and quite another to explain why the two sides will allow mutually damaging conflict to occur (instead of settling their differences sans conflict). Could a formal theory of conflict be assembled out of the concepts and methods of mainstream economics? Could game theory, the highest form of neoclassicism, be the source of such a theory?
