Executive Summary

Across a striking range of institutional contexts, pairs or networks of organisations that are formally engaged in shared enterprise nonetheless structure their relationships adversarially rather than cooperatively, with predictable harms accruing disproportionately to the weaker party. The pattern is not confined to any single sector. It appears in professional sports leagues and their lower divisions, in publishing houses and their authors, in major retailers and their suppliers, in established universities and their feeder institutions, in denominational hierarchies and their congregations, in metropolitan and regional governments, in established firms and their subcontractors, and in many further contexts. In each case, the parties share substantial common interest in the success of the joint enterprise, and in each case the stronger party adopts a posture toward the weaker that extracts short-term value at the cost of the long-term health of the system. This paper identifies the recurring structural mechanisms that produce this pattern, examines several illustrative domains, considers why the pattern persists despite its evident costs, and offers some observations on what tends to break it. The argument proceeds without claiming that asymmetric relationships must be adversarial or that cooperation is universally available; rather, it claims that the default to adversarial structure is more pervasive and more damaging than the parties typically recognise, and that the asymmetry of harm is itself among the most consistent findings across cases.

The Structural Pattern

The pattern under examination has a recognisable shape. Two or more institutions exist in a relationship that contains both shared and divergent interests. The shared interests typically concern the long-term viability of the system within which both operate: the integrity of a market, the credibility of a profession, the health of a supply chain, the stability of a community, the cultural standing of a shared enterprise. The divergent interests concern the immediate distribution of value generated by the system: revenue shares, pricing terms, governance influence, recognition, the assignment of risk and cost.

Where the parties are of comparable standing, negotiation over the distribution of value typically operates within constraints that protect the shared interests, because each party has both the leverage and the incentive to insist on terms that preserve the common enterprise. Where the parties are of unequal standing, the stronger party can extract terms that gradually erode the conditions under which the joint enterprise functions, and the weaker party lacks the leverage to insist on protection. The result is a relationship in which the adversarial frame dominates the cooperative one, in which short-term distributional outcomes are systematically favoured over long-term systemic health, and in which the weaker party absorbs disproportionate harm not only because it receives a smaller share of the value but because it bears most of the volatility and most of the costs of systemic stress.

Several mechanisms reliably produce and sustain this pattern.

The first is the asymmetry of exit options. The stronger institution typically has alternatives to any particular weaker counterparty, while the weaker institution has either no alternative to the stronger or a small number of alternatives that are themselves structurally similar. A major retailer can replace a supplier; the supplier cannot easily replace the retailer. A premier league can negotiate without the second tier; the second tier cannot construct an equivalent product without the premier. A publishing house can replace an author; the author cannot easily reach equivalent distribution without the publisher. The exit asymmetry produces a bargaining asymmetry that compounds across every interaction.

The second is the asymmetry of time horizons. Stronger institutions tend to operate on shorter effective time horizons in their relationships with weaker counterparts, because the consequences of weaker-party distress affect the stronger party only at the system level and only with substantial delay. A retailer that drives a supplier to bankruptcy faces no immediate consequence and may face no consequence at all if a replacement supplier is available; the cumulative effect of a depleted supplier base manifests only over years and is often attributed to other causes when it does. The weaker party, by contrast, is forced into immediate-term thinking by the existential character of the threats it faces, which further reduces its capacity to negotiate for long-term protection.

The third is the asymmetry of narrative authority. Stronger institutions typically control the framing within which the relationship is understood by external observers, regulators, and the public. The narrative usually credits the stronger party with the value created by the joint enterprise and treats the weaker party as a contingent supplier of inputs. This narrative shapes the regulatory environment, the professional discourse, and even the self-understanding of the parties themselves. Weaker parties often internalise the narrative and accept terms that the narrative presents as natural, even where the underlying economic facts would support different terms.

The fourth is the dispersion of weaker-party interests. Stronger institutions are typically concentrated and well-organised, while weaker counterparts are typically numerous, geographically dispersed, and organised only weakly if at all. Collective action problems among weaker parties prevent the formation of negotiating coalitions that could partially offset the bargaining asymmetry, while the stronger party faces no equivalent collective action problem because its interests are already concentrated within a single institution.

The fifth is the capture of intermediate institutions. Regulators, industry bodies, and dispute resolution mechanisms that nominally exist to balance the parties are typically funded, staffed, and influenced disproportionately by the stronger institutions. The intermediate institutions develop incentives to preserve the stronger party’s preferred arrangements even where their formal mandate would point toward more balanced outcomes. This is not necessarily a matter of corruption in any narrow sense; it is more often the slow accommodation of regulatory and adjudicative cultures to the perspectives of the parties they interact with most frequently and most consequentially.

The sixth is the moral hazard of asymmetric absorption. When the system experiences stress, the weaker party absorbs the cost first and most fully, which protects the stronger party from the feedback that would otherwise prompt adjustment. The stronger party therefore continues behaviours that would be self-correcting in a more symmetric arrangement, while the weaker party adapts by depleting reserves, accepting riskier commitments, and tolerating practices that further undermine its position.

These six mechanisms typically operate together rather than independently. They are mutually reinforcing, and the institutional habits they create tend to harden over time as parties on both sides adjust their expectations and operations to match.

Illustrative Domains

Football League Architecture

The companion paper to this one examined the relationship between the Premier League and the Championship in detail. The structural features identified there exemplify the broader pattern: a closed top tier negotiating media rights independently of the lower tier on which it depends for its competitive structure; a distribution arrangement that produces a sixteen-to-one revenue ratio between top-flight and non-parachute Championship clubs; a parachute regime that mitigates the worst symptoms of the gap while preserving and indeed entrenching its causes; and a sustained pattern of insolvency events at lower-tier clubs that the upper-tier institution treats as exogenous to its own arrangements rather than as their predictable consequence. The asymmetry of harm is total: Premier League clubs have not collapsed, while Championship and lower-tier clubs collapse with regularity, and the supporter communities that have built decades of identity around those clubs absorb the human cost of the structural arrangement.

Publishing and Authorship

Trade publishing exhibits a closely related pattern. Publishers and authors share a common interest in the production and circulation of books, and the entire enterprise depends on a continuous flow of new authors entering the system and developing over multiple titles. The economic terms on which the relationship operates, however, have shifted decisively toward the publisher across recent decades. Advances have compressed across most of the market while concentrating at the top; standard royalty rates have declined relative to the production economics that historically supported them; rights packages have expanded in scope without proportionate expansion in compensation; and the marketing investment that determines a book’s commercial success is concentrated on a small number of titles per season, with the remainder receiving little support and absorbing the consequences of the under-investment in their reception.

The author bears the volatility of the system: when a book underperforms, the author absorbs the reputational consequence that affects future advances, while the publisher diversifies across a list. When the publishing house misjudges a market, the author whose book launches into that misjudgement absorbs the cost. When industry-wide pressures squeeze margins, the squeeze is passed downstream to authors more readily than upstream to retailers or distributors. The pattern of mid-list author attrition that the industry has experienced for a generation is the predictable cumulative effect of these arrangements, and the long-term cost is the depletion of the author development pipeline on which the industry depends for its future.

Retail and Supplier Networks

Major retailers operate within supplier relationships that exhibit the same structural features. The retailer holds disproportionate negotiating power because suppliers depend on shelf access for survival while the retailer can substitute among suppliers within most categories. Payment terms have lengthened across recent decades, transferring working capital risk from retailers to suppliers. Slotting fees, promotional contributions, and chargebacks transfer further costs downstream. Returns policies and category management practices transfer inventory risk and product development risk in the same direction.

The supplier base of major retail networks has correspondingly thinned over time. Smaller suppliers have exited or been absorbed; remaining suppliers have consolidated to reach the scale necessary to absorb the cost transfers; product variety and innovation have reduced as suppliers concentrate on the limited number of products they can carry within the constrained margins available. The retailer benefits in the short term from improved cost terms; the cost of the depleted supplier ecosystem manifests in product staleness, supply fragility, and the loss of the regional and specialty suppliers that historically distinguished one retailer’s offering from another. The recent supply chain disruptions exposed how thin the supplier base had become, and the remediation costs have substantially exceeded the cumulative savings the squeezing had produced.

Higher Education and Feeder Institutions

The relationship between elite universities and the secondary schools, community colleges, and regional universities that feed students and faculty into them exhibits the pattern in a less commercial but no less consequential form. Elite universities benefit from the developmental work performed by feeder institutions: the early identification of talent, the foundational instruction that prepares students for advanced work, the production of the doctoral students and early-career faculty who supply the elite institutions’ staffing pipelines. The compensation that flows back to the feeder institutions, whether in financial, reputational, or institutional terms, is minimal.

Feeder institutions absorb the costs of student development and the attrition of the most talented faculty members to elite recruitment. The narrative authority of elite institutions presents the talent flow as a natural meritocratic outcome, obscuring the developmental work that produces the talent in the first place. Regional universities that have spent decades developing strong departments find those departments routinely raided by elite institutions whose recruitment offers exceed the regional institution’s capacity to match. The cumulative effect is a higher education system in which institutional resources are progressively concentrated at the top while the developmental capacity that the top institutions depend on is progressively depleted.

Established Firms and Subcontractors

The relationship between established firms and the network of contractors, freelancers, and small firms that perform much of their actual work exhibits the same dynamic. The established firm controls access to clients and the prestige that allows the work to be done at premium rates. The subcontractor performs the work itself, often at compensation levels that reflect the firm’s bargaining power rather than the subcontractor’s contribution. Payment terms favour the firm. Risk allocation favours the firm. The intellectual property generated in the course of the work flows to the firm. The reputational benefits accumulate to the firm.

When economic conditions tighten, the firm protects its core staff by reducing subcontractor utilisation; when conditions improve, the firm increases utilisation without restoring the subcontractors who exited during the downturn. The subcontractor population is therefore subject to a volatility that the firm experiences only in attenuated form, with the subcontractors who survive multiple cycles increasingly drawn from those with independent financial reserves rather than from those whose work is most valuable to the firm.

Metropolitan and Regional Governance

Metropolitan governments and the regional jurisdictions that surround them exhibit a comparable pattern in many countries. The metropolitan core captures the economic activity, the prestige, and the political attention; the surrounding region provides the workforce, the infrastructure corridors, the watersheds, the recreational space, and frequently the disposal sites for the costs the core does not absorb itself. Regional jurisdictions are typically smaller and weaker negotiators, often dependent on metropolitan economic linkages for their own viability, and find themselves accepting terms in transportation, environmental, and economic development arrangements that systematically transfer cost outward and benefit inward.

The pattern manifests in the well-documented phenomenon of regional infrastructure decline alongside metropolitan investment, in the difficulty of negotiating equitable water and waste arrangements across metropolitan-regional boundaries, and in the steady demographic pattern of regional population decline as residents relocate to the metropolitan area whose costs they had been absorbing. The metropolitan area benefits in the short term from the cost externalisation; the long-term cost of the depleted regional environment manifests in workforce shortages, infrastructure stress, and the cultural and political fractures that increasingly characterise metropolitan-regional relationships in many countries.

Denominational Hierarchies and Local Congregations

Within ecclesial structures, the relationship between denominational headquarters and local congregations frequently exhibits the same pattern, although the spiritual character of the relationship complicates straightforward analysis. Headquarters institutions depend on local congregations for the financial flow that sustains the central organisation, for the membership that constitutes the denomination’s claim to representation, and for the pastoral and missional work that gives the denomination its purpose. Local congregations depend on headquarters for credentialing, for shared resources, and for the connection to wider fellowship that distinguishes a denominational identity from purely local independence.

The flow of resources and influence in many denominational structures has nonetheless tilted toward headquarters across recent generations, with congregational contributions sustaining administrative structures whose direct service to the contributing congregations has often diminished. Decisions affecting congregational life are often taken centrally with limited congregational input, and congregations that resist central decisions discover that the formal structures of accountability flow downward more readily than upward. The harms accrue disproportionately to the weaker party, with congregational decline absorbed locally while denominational headquarters preserve their staffing and their programs through reserves, property dispositions, and reduced grants to the congregations from which the original revenue had flowed. The Scriptural pattern of the church as a body in which each member contributes according to its function and is honoured according to its need stands in tension with these institutional dynamics, and the recognition of that tension is itself among the resources that ecclesial reformers across history have drawn upon in seeking renewal.

Other Domains

The pattern extends well beyond the cases examined here. Hospital systems and the independent physicians and clinics that interact with them exhibit it. Streaming platforms and the musicians and filmmakers whose work they distribute exhibit it. Major sports leagues and the lower-tier developmental leagues that feed them exhibit it across multiple sports. Defence contractors and their tiered supplier networks exhibit it. Academic publishers and the scholars who produce their content without compensation while paying for access to the products of their own labour exhibit it in an especially stark form. Tech platforms and the application developers who build on their interfaces exhibit it. The list is not exhaustive, and the recurrence of the pattern across such varied domains is itself evidence that the underlying mechanisms are structural rather than incidental.

Why the Pattern Persists

A reasonable observer might expect adversarial-asymmetric arrangements to self-correct over time. The stronger party should recognise that depleting the weaker party damages the system on which both depend, and rational long-term self-interest should drive the stronger party toward more cooperative terms. This expectation is sometimes met but more often disappointed, and the reasons are themselves structural.

The stronger party rarely experiences the cost of system depletion as a salient operational pressure. The cost manifests slowly, attributes diffusely, and is often absorbed by replacement weaker parties whose entry refreshes the system without requiring structural reform. The author who exits trade publishing is replaced by another author; the supplier who exits a retail relationship is replaced by another supplier; the football club that collapses is replaced by another club’s promotion; the regional institution that declines is replaced in the consciousness of the dominant institution by the next one in line. The stronger party therefore receives no clear signal that its arrangements are unsustainable, and its decision-makers, whose careers and incentives operate on time horizons shorter than the depletion cycle, have no immediate reason to alter behaviour.

The weaker party’s perspective is constrained in symmetrical fashion. The party that recognises the systemic problem is rarely the party with the leverage to change it, and the parties with leverage have already adjusted to the arrangement and benefit from it. The collective action problem among weaker parties prevents them from organising the bargaining capacity that would be necessary to alter terms, and the dispersion of weaker parties means that those most affected are typically least able to coordinate action.

The narrative environment around the relationship reinforces the existing arrangement. The stronger party’s framing presents its dominant position as the natural reflection of its superior contribution, and the weaker party’s predicament as the consequence of its own deficiencies rather than of structural arrangements. This framing is amplified by the regulatory and academic institutions whose perspectives have accommodated to the dominant party’s view, and it shapes the self-understanding of weaker parties to the extent that they often accept terms that the framing presents as inevitable.

The pattern persists, in short, because every structural feature of the relationship works against its correction, and because the parties best positioned to correct it have the least incentive to do so. The pathology is stable in the technical sense: deviations from it tend to revert rather than to compound.

What Tends to Break the Pattern

Despite the structural stability of adversarial-asymmetric arrangements, the pattern is sometimes broken. The cases in which it breaks are themselves instructive about the conditions necessary for change.

External regulatory intervention has produced the most consistent pattern-breaking outcomes across the domains examined. Where a regulator with genuine authority and independence has imposed structural changes that the parties would not have negotiated on their own, the resulting arrangements have generally proven more stable and more productive than what they replaced. The success of such interventions depends critically on the regulator’s insulation from capture by the dominant party, and the historical record suggests that this insulation is difficult to maintain across long periods.

Existential threat to the dominant party occasionally produces cooperative reform. When the stronger party’s own viability is threatened by some external development, the calculus of system preservation shifts and arrangements that had previously been impossible become urgent. The cooperative arrangements that emerge under such pressure tend to be more durable than those negotiated under more comfortable conditions, because all parties have internalised the system-level stakes.

The emergence of effective collective representation among weaker parties has occasionally altered the bargaining geometry sufficiently to produce reform. The conditions under which such representation emerges and sustains itself are delicate, and the historical pattern is that collective representation among weaker parties is generally easier to establish than to sustain, with the dominant party reliably devoting substantial resources to its dissolution.

Catastrophic system failure, finally, has sometimes produced reform when other mechanisms have failed. The cumulative effect of weaker-party depletion eventually produces system-level breakdowns that even the dominant party cannot ignore, and reform follows the breakdown. The cost of the breakdown itself, however, is typically extreme, and the human cost of waiting for catastrophic failure as a reform mechanism is among the most consequential social costs of the broader pattern.

A final consideration concerns the moral and spiritual resources that have historically informed reform efforts. The Scriptural witness consistently presses against the structural exploitation of the weaker by the stronger, from the prophetic denunciations of those who grind the faces of the poor through the apostolic instruction that those whom we count less honourable are to receive abundant honour. The recognition that the asymmetric extraction of value from the weaker party for the benefit of the stronger is not merely inefficient but unjust, and that systems built upon it are subject to a moral judgement that operates independently of the system’s commercial success, has been among the more reliable resources from which reformers have drawn over centuries. The contemporary tendency to frame these relationships exclusively in commercial or institutional terms has impoverished the discourse and reduced the resources available for reform, and the recovery of a more substantive moral vocabulary may itself be a precondition for the cooperative arrangements that the present moment requires.

Conclusion

The default of asymmetric institutional relationships toward adversarial structure is among the most consistent and most damaging patterns in contemporary institutional life. It appears across domains as varied as professional sports, publishing, retail, higher education, denominational governance, and metropolitan-regional relations, and the structural mechanisms that produce it operate similarly across these otherwise dissimilar contexts. The harms produced fall disproportionately on the weaker parties, whose volatility and depletion are absorbed into the system in ways that protect the stronger parties from the feedback that would otherwise prompt adjustment. The pattern is structurally stable and rarely self-corrects, with reform typically requiring external intervention, existential pressure, effective collective representation, or catastrophic failure.

The deeper observation is that institutional relationships of unequal standing are not condemned to adversarial structure. The cooperative alternative is generally available in principle, often available in detailed design, and sometimes available in practice. What is missing is typically not the institutional design but the will to adopt it, and the will is missing because the parties best positioned to adopt cooperative arrangements are those with the least immediate incentive to do so. The recognition that the adversarial default is a choice rather than a necessity, and that the choice is being made continuously by parties whose interests it appears to serve in the short term while damaging the systems they depend on in the long term, is among the more important first steps toward institutional arrangements that honour the actual interdependence that the cooperative frame already recognises.

The cost of continued adversarial defaults is paid disproportionately by the weaker parties in each relationship, but it is ultimately paid by the systems themselves, including by the stronger parties whose dominance becomes meaningless when the structures that sustained it have eroded beyond repair. This recognition does not by itself produce reform, but it may at least clarify what is at stake when reform is declined.