Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then maybe "taking over the market" is a bad metric, and we should be optimizing for making a company that makes the workers' lives better. The US cultural bias is showing here, as it's assumed that profit is above all else, and a company that forgoes profit to make workers happier must thus be less good. The vast majority of people in companies are workers. Let's stop optimizing for owner wealth and start optimizing…
You are making normative arguments, but the question is wholly empirical -- the metrics being applied here are the ones that actually measure the success and viability of firms, not metrics selected to fit the observer's emotional attachments. Firms that are optimized for turning market demand into revenue streams will naturally outcompete firms that are optimized for other goals, regardless of what ideals or prefere…
> There's a large economics literature on this: worker-owned cooperatives have not taken over the market, although they are an available institutional form, because (a) they find it hard to raise capital
There are any number of ways of making it easier for co-ops to raise captital.
> (b) they tend to make decisions that maximize worker welfare rather than profit, e.g. they won't sack underperforming divisions or expand in ways that dilute existing workers' stake.
You could make a similar case that making decisions solely around stock price leads to underperformance as well, if we quantify "performance" in terms of value provided to the broader economy. Mass layoffs are great for stock price, but they deal serious damage to your institutional knowledge base. Rather than simply shuttering an underperforming division, if you buy out the ownership stakes of the people working there, they'll have cash to re-train with. If we find that co-ops have a tendency to avoid doing that when necessary, we can tweak the incentives and subsidize a portion of the buyout, under certain circumstaces. Subsidies to tweak incentives are nothing new.
> This isn't something that anyone can decide upon
Yes, it is. Policy can change which strategies predominate in the market, by shifting incentives, by controlling streams of investment, and simply by regulating undesirable strategies out of existence. Mixed economies can be very effective. The notion that the market is a force which out to go untampered with is ideological, and it doesn't serve us well.