Evidence on US Experiences with Dispute Resolution Systems

Abstract

This paper is a non-technical survey of the results of recent quan- titative analyses of interest arbitration systems operating in the U.S. It contains a review of the broader context in which arbitration has become a feature of public sector wage determination, and surveys of quantitative studies of arbitrator selection and decision—making in simulation experiments and in practice. For reasons that still remain unclear, simple statistical analyses continue to confirm a very stable set of operating characteristics for these systems. The data suggest that the variability in the outcomes that exists across arbitration systems is a product either of constraints placed on arbitrator decisions by the institutional setup or of differences in the behavior of the parties in response to different institutional setups, and not of differences in arbitrator behavior.