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There has been considerable research into different approaches to workplace dispute resolution in the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK), and to a lesser extent other English-speaking countries. This chapter considers what guidance this research can provide into the practical implications of these different approaches.

One frame of reference for evaluating different approaches to workplace dispute resolution is provided by Budd’s three objectives of the employment relationship: equity, voice and efficiency.

While dispute resolution procedures can contribute to all three objectives, there can be negative consequences for employees who make use of formal workplace dispute resolution procedures. It is desirable that workplace disputes be resolved quickly and informally.

Such an approach places considerable weight on the skills of line managers. Unfortunately, there is evidence of a preference among line managers to replace pragmatic approaches to conflict resolution with a rigid adherence to process and procedure. This is partly due to a lack of skills, but is often compounded by inadequate support from senior management.

While it is important for organisations to have formal workplace dispute resolution procedures, the focus should be on line managers. The role of human resources staff and senior management should primarily be to monitor the dispute resolution system, ensure that it is operating effectively and deal with any emerging issues. They should ensure appropriate training is in place and provide appropriate support to line managers. Only when line managers have failed to resolve disputes should they become directly involved.

This paper investigates the adoption, structure, and function of dispute resolution procedures in the nonunion workplace. Whereas grievance procedures in unionized workplaces have been an important area of study in the field of industrial relations, research on dispute resolution procedures in nonunion workplaces has lagged behind. As a result, our knowledge of the development of nonunion procedures remains relatively limited. Similarly, with a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g. Lewin, 1987, 1990), our knowledge of workplace grievance activity is almost entirely based on research conducted in unionized settings. Given the major differences in the institutional contexts of union and nonunion workplaces in the United States, existing ideas about workplace dispute resolution developed in the unionized setting will likely require significant modification in order to understand dispute resolution procedures and activity in the nonunion workplace. Issues relating to dispute resolution in the nonunion workplace are of increasing importance to public policy given the combination of continued stagnation in levels of union representation and mounting concerns over rising levels of employment litigation in the courts. Knowing what nonunion dispute resolution procedures look like and how they function will help answer the question of what role these procedures may play in the future governance of the workplace.

The purpose of this chapter is to report some initial findings based on the WTO Dispute Settlement Data Set (Ver. 2.0) that the authors have compiled for the World Bank. The data set contains approximately 28 000 observations on the workings of the Dispute Settlement system. It covers all 351 WTO disputes initiated through the official filing of a Request for Consultations from January 1, 1995, until October 25, 2006; and for these disputes it includes events occurring until December 31, 2006. Each dispute is followed through its legal life via the panel stage, the Appellate Body stage, to the implementation stage.

The descriptive statistics in the chapter points to three observations. The first and obvious observation is the almost complete absence of least developed countries. Second, less poor and developing countries are much more active and successful than the authors would have expected. Third, the EU and the United States dominate less than expected, being much more often the subject of complaints, than a complaining party, and they have a very low share of all panelists.

This experiment analyzes multi-offer versions of the signaling and screening litigation games, as well as a bilateral multi-offer litigation game. A plaintiff has either a low or a high claim on an uninformed defendant, and the two negotiate in an attempt to reach a pre-trial settlement. Trial is costly, and settlement generates surplus over which the two parties can bargain. In the signaling game, the defendant has the power to make the offer, while the plaintiff makes the offer in the screening game. Previous experiments on single-offer games find that disputes occur even when offers contain surplus not predicted under the theory, and fairness appears to be important in explaining deviations from theory. This research examines whether renegotiation in the form of successive sequential offers can yield efficiency gains via lower dispute rates. There are four main findings. One, under the one-sided multi-offer structure the excess dispute rate is 23 percentage-points lower in the screening game, and the high-offer dispute rate is 31 percentage-points lower in signaling game. The bilateral game yields an additional 15 percentage-point reduction in the high-offer dispute rate, but excess disputes persist. Two, in these games, proposers take advantage of the multi-offer opportunity and make around three to four offers per negotiation. Three, across games the surplus in a fair offer remains constant at about one-sixth of the surplus, but the empirical benchmark from which this is measured varies according to which player has the power to make the offer. In the one-sided games, the benchmark is the respective zero-surplus endpoint, but in the bilateral game the benchmark is the surplus midpoint. Fourth, dynamic behavior plays an important but complex role in observed outcomes. Multi-offer mechanisms may be alternatives to costly information transmission mechanisms like disclosure or discovery.

The usage of the WTO Dispute Settlement System (DSS) is dominated by high-income countries. Since the ultimate enforcement threat of the system is based on retaliation, countries may take their economic size as well as their specific bilateral retaliatory capacity into account when deciding whether or not to respond to a detrimental infringement of a trade agreement by filing a costly complaint. Hence, various scholars conjecture that lawsuits surfacing in the record of the WTO constitute only the biased tip of an iceberg of trade disputes. In order to investigate such a potential bias, this chapter sets up a sequential game of the DSS. Subsequently, a binary choice model is employed to empirically explain a country's decision whether or not to litigate against a trading partner. The results suggest that a country is more likely to file a complaint if (i) it is large, (ii) its trading partner is small, (iii) the trade value of the commodity at stake is large, and (iv) its retaliatory capacity is large.

We survey several of the theoretical models that have been applied to the analysis of the GATT/WTO dispute settlement process. These include repeated game models, which emphasize the punishment aspect of dispute settlement, and incomplete contracting models, which emphasize the “gap-filling” aspect. Our analysis emphasizes the implications of these models for the strengthening of the dispute settlement process under the WTO and for its application to the TRIPS agreement. We also discuss how models of settlement bargaining can be applied to obtain empirical predictions about which cases will actually proceed to an actual finding by the dispute panel.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is endeavor of paramount importance that is likely to redefine socio-economic relations in countries and regions concerned. The debate on BRI’s relevance, scope, and potential has only begun, and it remains uncertain how exactly it will unfold. In this context, questions pertinent to regulatory frameworks in the context of which BRI initiatives are implemented belong to the most complex and the most interesting ones. Due to BRI’s novelty and open-endedness, all matters pertaining to its implementation are of exploratory nature; especially the legal aspects of its implementation. This aim of this chapter is to provide insightful answers to legal questions regarding BRI and dispute resolution via the examination of the current legal status of BRI, as well as explore how trust and cultural awareness can contribute to the avoidance of business-related disputes.

Purpose – This chapter explicates the categorical resources and practices used in some disputes involving two children.

Methodology – The data on which the study is based consists of a transcript of an audio recording of the naturally occurring talk-in-interaction during a family meal. This data is analyzed using the approach of membership categorization analysis (MCA).

Findings – We show that it is neither the category collection “children” nor the category collection “siblings” that is relevant for the organization of these disputes but rather a number of asymmetrical standardized relational pairs, such as “rule-enforcer” and “offender” or “offender” and “victim.” It is these pairs of categories that are demonstrably relevant for the members, providing for and making intelligible their disputes. We then consider the question of the demonstrably relevant “wider context” of the disputes to which the disputants are actually oriented. This wider context is an omnirelevant oppositional social relationship between the children. We demonstrate that the disputes reflexively constitute the character of their oppositional relationship and show how these are instantiations of an omnirelevant category collection, namely, “parties to an oppositional relationship.”

Value of chapter – This chapter contributes to the corpus of ethnomethodological studies on children's culture in action and more particularly on the categorical organization of children's (and others’) disputes. It also contributes to MCA more generally in respect to its focus on the issues of omnirelevance and the “occasionality” of category collections.

Beginning with the assumption that antidumping laws are used to address adverse shocks in import-competing industries, this chapter provides an explanation for the infrequent utilization of the Dispute Settlement Understanding under the Antidumping Agreement. It does so with a very simple model that represents the shock by a one-dimensional random variable. This is found on an interpretation of the ADA as a de facto escape clause. ADA signatories are homogeneous, which enables the representation of the expected frequency of shocks over each member's import-competing sectors by the binomial distribution with identical parameters. The explanation for the infrequency of utilization of the DSU invokes a repeated Prisoners’ Dilemma with two levels of cooperation in an infinite horizon game. The high level is free trade in all sectors. The low level is the application of ADA duties in sectors incurring the shock in a manner that is consistent with the ADA. The high level of cooperation in all sectors in every period is not sustainable for any degree of patience. A convex combination of the high and low levels of cooperation is sustainable for some degrees of patience under the folk theorem. However, this combination of cooperation is attainable only with the support of the DSU. The extent of importance of the DSU depends on the completeness of information with which signatories are endowed. With complete information, dispute resolution does not occur in equilibrium. However, its presence supports cooperation through its mandate to sanction retaliation. If filing were prohibitively costly, disputes would never arise, and cooperation would be expected to evaporate. In the instance of incomplete information with costless filing, disputes would occur in equilibrium whenever an AD action was taken. In the most realistic circumstance, that of incomplete information and nonprohibitive filing costs, disputes would arise only when the number of AD actions exceeded their (common) expectation. This provides a conceptual explanation for the observations of Tarullo (2002) and Bown (2005) that ADA disputes are infrequent.

The dispute resolution process in the construction industry is known for delays in settlement, with some cases even escalating to complex arbitration and litigation. To avoid conflicts turning into disputes, the parties need to be proactive in identifying and resolving conflicts in their nascent stages. It is here that innovative lean construction practices can potentially act as a game-changer to avoid disputes, and this study aims to attempt to understand this phenomenon empirically.

A questionnaire-based empirical study, followed by semi-structured interviews, is conducted to understand the relevance of key tenets of lean principles in dispute avoidance.

Although stakeholders agree on the usefulness and practicality of lean principles in dispute avoidance, the extent of agreement is lesser when it comes to its implementation practicality. Moreover, there is a demographic influence observed on lean tenets such as “open communication”, “stakeholder collaboration” and “constraint identification”.

The results point towards an approach that combines contractual mandate, training and awareness creation to iron out the differences in the usefulness and practicality of lean approaches to avoid disputes.

Lean implementation is widely discussed in many construction contexts, such as sustainability, productivity improvement and planning. However, a discussion on lean philosophy’s role in dispute avoidance is muted. Therefore, this study assumes significance.