Abstract
The agency problem in unions was recognized relatively early in the modern American literature on the theory of labor organizations. Arthur Ross (1948) may have been the first to observe that union leaders, as the agents of union members, are not infrequently governed by interests at variance with their constituents. Later writers attempted to state this conflict more rigorously with varying degrees of completeness and success (Ashenfelter and Johnson, 1969; Atherton, 1973; Berkowitz, 1954; Weinstein, 1966). Although they recognized that preferences might not be identical, that information might be relatively more costly to members, and that the nature of political constraints on leaders endowed the latter with some discretionary powers, their analyses failed to adequately identify the mechanism that would permit or sustain a divergence of objectives between union management and union membership.
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Martin, D.L. (1984). The Agency Problem in a Nonproprietary Theory of Union Behavior. In: Rosa, JJ. (eds) The Economics of Trade Unions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1371-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1371-9_8
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