A bargaining perspective on resource advantage

Abstract Whereas prices serve to allocate many resources in market economies, there remain vast reservoirs of unpriced resources to be managed. Business management and strategy concerns the creation, evaluation, manipulation, administration, and deployment of unpriced specialized scarce resource combinations. This paper applies the formalism of cooperative game theory to these concerns. In cooperative game theory, rents appear as the negotiated payments for the services of scarce valuable resources. The division of surplus is determined by the relative values created by different use combinations of resources. Within this framework, the strategy problem is clearly seen as one of discovering or estimating the value of various resource combinations. New wealth can be created by trade in resources as long as there are hitherto unexamined combinations. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.