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Arbitration is often used to settle bargaining disputes. Frequently in such disagreements, one party has better information with respect to the surplus to be allocated. This paper considers the impact that the choice of dispute resolution mechanism, conventional or final offer arbitration, has on settlement. This paper shows that theoretically final offer arbitration can systematically favor the informed party by shifting the contract zone towards more profitable allocations while conventional arbitration is theoretically less likely to generate a mutually agreeable settlement. Laboratory results find that the surplus shares are consistent with the predicted favoritism. However, settlement is positively correlated with the width of the contract zone and the data suggest that the location of the contract zone in final offer arbitration generates more disputes.

We replicate and extend the social history treatment of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) investment game, to further document how the reporting of financial history influences how laboratory societies organize themselves over time. We replicate Berg et al. (1995) by conducting a No History and a Financial History session to determine whether a report summarizing the financial transactions of a previous experimental session will significantly reduce entropy in the amounts sent by Investors and returned by Stewards in the investment game, as Berg et al. (1995) found. We extend Berg et al. (1995) in two ways. First, we conduct a total of five sessions (one No History and four Financial History sessions). Second, we introduce Shannon’s (1948) measure of entropy from information theory to assess whether the introduction of financial transaction history reduces the amount of dispersion in the amounts invested and returned across generations of players. Results across sessions indicate that entropy declined in both the amounts sent by Investors and the percentage returned by Stewards, but these patterns are weaker and mixed compared to those in the Berg et al. (1995) study. Additional research is needed to test how initial conditions, path dependencies, actors’ strategic reasoning about others’ behavior, multiple sessions, and communication may mediate the impact of financial history. The study’s multiple successive Financial History sessions and entropy measure are new to the investment game literature.

Understanding how worker well-being is distributed across the population is of paramount importance. With such knowledge policy makers can devise efficient strategies to improve social welfare. This volume contains 13 chapters on topics enhancing our comprehension of inequality across workers. The issues addressed deal directly with the economic institutions that affect individual and family earnings distributions. The themes explored include job training, worker and firm mobility, minimum wages, wage arrears, unions, collective bargaining, unemployment insurance, and schooling. Among the questions answered are: To what extent do greater work hours of women mitigate the widening family earnings distribution? To what extent does deunionization widen the distribution of earnings? Do computers really cause a widening of the earnings distribution? How would the Russian wage distribution change if one accounted for wage arrears? How much of job creation and job destruction comes about because of business relocation? To what extent does maternal education increase children's education? Why do increases in the minimum wage fail to substantially decrease employment as economic theory would predict? And, to what extent do job skills matter for low-income workers?

What makes employees feel well within an organization? The aim of the present chapter is to start from a paradigm that emphasizes human relationality, affectivity, and intersubjective systems, and accordingly focuses on how well-being is emerging from contextual interrelations between employees. Applying this perspective to a qualitative study of nurses in a nursing home, I came to see the work community as a well-being-generating system in which the well-being of individual members is constructed together as an ongoing social accomplishment. In addition, I identified four systemic processes within the work community that greatly influence the well-being-generating capacity of the system.

This chapter explains the impact containerisation has on the various partners of the global supply chain and the challenges companies encounter and the solutions they use in dealing with empty container repositioning.

The phenomenon of imbalanced container flows and its impact on shipping lines, shippers, container haulage companies, port development and the economy are presented. Special attention is given to explain the many solutions companies use to reduce the impact of empty container repositioning, hence tracing out the past research that led to these solutions and pointing to potentially new research directions in the future.

Because of the widespread use of containerisation and the imbalanced container flows that results from globalisation, empty container repositioning will be an ongoing issue for the maritime logistics industry. Many solutions are being used, but there is room for improvement and more research is needed.

Empty container repositioning is an important issue but has not been deemed as such in the literature. This chapter explains the reasons it is important and that its impact is not limited to shipping lines only but affects the whole supply chain.

We review our work as collaborators over nearly 40 years as researchers and OD practitioners on the human, cultural, and organizational aspects of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). This chapter addresses (1) how our thinking, research methods, and practices developed over time, (2) accounts of deriving theory from practice and contrariwise of applying theory to practical matters, (3) how our respective shifts from academe toward scholarly-practice influenced our thinking and how we write, and (4) varieties of scholarly collaboration – ranging from intensive interchange to sequential pitch and catch. Early work covers a study of a “white-knight” acquisition and then advising on post-merger integration in a hostile takeover, revealing the stages of a deal, dynamics of buyers and sellers, and human factors that produce the “merger syndrome.”

Throughout we talk about confronting challenges of the scholar-practitioner divide as it pertains to role definition and boundary management as well to our theorizing, writing, and publication agenda. The chapter concludes with reflections on doing applied research in collaboration with a colleague (and friend).