This book uses economic theory to argue that worker-controlled firms are rare due to market failures rather than inherent organizational defects. The book will be of interest to scholarly researchers, graduate students, and advanced undergraduates in economics, especially in industrial organization, labor economics, comparative economics, organizational economics, and finance.

Monograph comprising an evaluation of workers self management experiences in Peru and Yugoslavia - discusses the solutions to macroeconomics problems such as unequal income distribution, decision making on capital investment, and labour productivity within self-managed firms, etc., and considers micro and macro economic theory relating to efficiency and competition. Graphs and references.

Monograph presenting an economic theory in support of a new economic system based on workers' self-management (workers participation) - covers the equilibrium of a competitive enterprise and changing market conditions, the decentralization of decision making, labour supply functions, economic policy problems, 'income sharing' (wages) and wage incentive, the allocation of economic resources, legal aspects and basic institutional forms of the labour-managed economy, etc. Diagrams and references.

The economic theory of the labor-managed firm dates back 60 years. Here I review the intellectual history of this field, with critical remarks and proposals for future development. The decades of the 1960s-1980s saw a burst of theoretical speculation that generally did not hold up well under empirical scrutiny. By the 1990s, progress on the mainstream theory of the firm was overtaking some of this early research. At the same time, a growing body of econometric work on labor-managed firms was providing new stylized facts for theorists to explain. While the earlier period was characterized by an excess supply of theories relative to facts, more recently the balance has begun to tip in the opposite direction. I close by suggesting new theoretical directions that might shed light on the empirical asymmetries between capital-managed and labor-managed firms.

Discusses the theory of labour-managed firms or producers' cooperatives, and of economies companies principally of such firms.

A pioneering account of the surging global tide of market power—and how it stifles workers around the world In an era of technological progress and easy communication, it might seem reasonable to assume that the world’s working people have never had it so good. But wages are stagnant and prices are rising, so that everything from a bottle of beer to a prosthetic hip costs more. Economist Jan Eeckhout shows how this is due to a small number of companies exploiting an unbridled rise in market power—the ability to set prices higher than they could in a properly functioning competitive marketplace. Drawing on his own groundbreaking research and telling the stories of common workers throughout, he demonstrates how market power has suffocated the world of work, and how, without better mechanisms to ensure competition, it could lead to disastrous market corrections and political turmoil. The Profit Paradox describes how, over the past forty years, a handful of companies have reaped most of the rewards of technological advancements—acquiring rivals, securing huge profits, and creating brutally unequal outcomes for workers. Instead of passing on the benefits of better technologies to consumers through lower prices, these “superstar” companies leverage new technologies to charge even higher prices. The consequences are already immense, from unnecessarily high prices for virtually everything, to fewer startups that can compete, to rising inequality and stagnating wages for most workers, to severely limited social mobility. A provocative investigation into how market power hurts average working people, The Profit Paradox also offers concrete solutions for fixing the problem and restoring a healthy economy.