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Terence Highsmith's avatar

Interesting! However, I'm skeptical about the marginal productivity of worker co-ops over incentive pay. It can be tricky to distinguish between the two because worker co-ops almost always intrinsically implement a form of incentive pay, that is, the worker's pay varies with the firm's performance, whereas in many traditional capitalist firms, salary is fixed. Economic theory *can* predict that certain compensation schemes have free-rider problems, but other compensation schemes---especially pay for performance---do not. In fact, one of the most popular models today (principal-agent) predicts that pay for performance is optimal, group bonuses are good, and fixed salaries are worst.

This has created another mystery: why the heck do so many companies pay fixed salaries? It's probably because of risk aversion. People like having a consistent salary rather than getting paid $0 today and $250,000 in two years. (And that seems like a reason that might apply to worker co-ops as well.)

Anyway, the empirical evidence on worker co-ops productivity is not particularly convincing to me for this reason. For example, the experiment you cited cannot distinguish this because it compares a group that votes on its compensation contract to a group that does not, but the only allowable compensation contracts are group bonuses or tournament pay rather than individual pay-for-performance. Of course we should expect the group that can vote to perform better: the group vote is *itself* mimicking a selection effect, where people vote for the incentive contract they know will motivate themselves. If you as a manager in a capitalist firm knew your employees well enough to know which compensation contract would work best, you could re-create this effect in a capitalist firm (note: I'm not saying there is selection bias; I'm saying that the experiment's average treatment effect is equivalent to a sort of selection effect in a natural environment).

Also, we (economists) don't really have a good understanding of organizational structure in general. Early organizational economics models predicted that managers are useless, and newer models don't do much better. We still have no idea why managers are everywhere! But that too is an empirical observation that we shouldn't ignore. Does it mean that hierarchical organizational structures are better? No. But it does suggest that cooperative structures have some major frictions that prevent their implementation, at least.

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Bruhmachine's avatar

I think this is generally quite a good article, and am sympathetic to most of it. However, I think the strongest argument, that of investment, is reasonably effectively rebutted by what David Friedman says here (https://youtu.be/SAcR394NoAw?feature=shared&t=4682).

Essentially, if we expect capital to be the major limitation then economic sectors that require less capital should have far more workers coops, but this is not the case. Curious what you make of his argument.

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