Analysis of labor strike based on evolutionary game and catastrophe theory

Abstract

This paper analyzes the labor–employer relations during conditions that lead to strike using an evolutionary game and catastrophe theory. During a threat to strike, the employers may accept the whole or only a part of the demands of labors and improve the work conditions or decline the demands, and each selected strategies has its respective costs and benefits. The threat to strike action causes the formation of a game between the strikers and employers that in which, as time goes on, different strategies are evaluated by the players and the effective variables of strike faced gradual and continuous changes, which can lead to a sudden jump of the variables and push the system to very different conditions such as dramatic increase or decrease in the probability of selecting strategies. So the alliance between labors could suffer or reinforce. This discrete sudden change is called catastrophe. In this study after finding evolutionary stable strategies for each player, the catastrophe threshold analyzed by nonlinear evolutionary game and the managerial insight is proposed to employers to prevent the parameters from crossing the border of the catastrophe set that leads to a general strike.