Workers’ firm in mixed duopoly

Cooperatives, including those owned and run by workers (Workers Firms, WFs), compete with capitalist firms in oligopolistic industries (mixed oligopolies). We ra- tionalize several facts emerging from the empirical research as: the concern of WFs for their employment; the interplay between membership and workplace safeguard within WFs; the different reaction to shocks between WFs and capitalist enterprises. We do so by means of a new model of WFs’ short-run behavior in a mixed duopoly. We innovate in modelling the WF’s objective function by including both profits and employment, and characterize the resulting Nash equilibrium