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The University of New Hampshire Law Review

Abstract

[Excerpt] “Health and safety managers face complex challenges in today’s production environments. They are confronted with increasingly flexible, autonomous and polyvalent contexts. Asymmetry of information on the workplace is widespread because various intervening parties rely on information lacking conformity. Social partners generate and use information which supports or benefits their pursuit of differing goals. Ascertaining and controlling this information can prove both difficult and costly. When addressing health and safety issues, one intervening partner alters or changes behavior in response to changes introduced by the other side. Strategic behaviors result, based on post-contract opportunism (moral hazard) and alliances with partners who can reasonably be expected to deliver predictable and effective contributions toward individual goals (adverse selection). These behaviors arise out of diagnostic problems, difficulty in determining acceptable risk, asymmetries in the information used in risk taking decisions on the part of social partners and the operation of health and safety systems. . . .

Inevitably, effective and efficient management of health and safety must spring from an understanding of the dynamics governing the intervening parties. This paper makes use of non-cooperative game theory to identify conditions fostering cooperation between managers and workers as social partners in the workplace.”

Repository Citation

Sylvie Nadeau, Co-operation in Health and Safety: A Game Theory Analysis, 1 Pierce L. Rev. 219 (2003), available at http://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol1/iss3/7

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