This paper examines the effects of an exogenous shift in the cost of contractual completeness induced by workload spikes on the endogenous selection of procurement terms. I conduct an instrumental-variable estimation of the causal effect of workload on contracting. In a sample of 150−thousand contracts from 85 civilian procurement offices over 11 years, increases in contracting officer workload...

The oxygen consumption-heat relationship is analyzed using a scheme of reactions underlying muscle aerobic metabolism. The enzymatic chemical reactions of the scheme are considered near equilibrium during a contraction, and far from equilibrium during energy dissipation in a non-contracting state. Implications show that for two different metabolic rates, the proportionality between oxygen consu...

BACKGROUND Industry commissions contracting companies to perform network meta-analysis for health technology assessment (HTA) and reimbursement submissions. Our objective was to estimate the number of network meta-analyses performed by consulting companies contracted by industry, to assess whether they were published, and to explore reasons for non-publication. METHODS We searched MEDLINE for...

The use of electronic contracts is emerging as a way to improve the efficiency of contracting processes. Electronic contracts are, however, often used as a direct replacement for traditional paper contracts – which we call shallow e-contracting. Consequently, business processes in general and contracting processes in particular do not change much through the use of electronic contracts. New bus...

We provide a simple comparative test of contracting and value relevance theories of accounting, using data on the importance of countries’ debt and equity markets. Contracting (debt markets) theory predicts conditional conservatism, in the Basu (1997) sense of asymmetrically timelier loss recognition than gain recognition, as proxied by a stronger relation between earnings and negative returns....

Leveled-commitment contracting is a negotiation protocol in which an agent is allowed to be freed from a contract at the cost of paying a penalty to the other contract party. While there has been some related work on analyzing agents’ strategic behavior in leveledcommitment contracting and applying decommitment contracting in practical resource allocation problems, decommitment penalties are ex...

Contracting-out has become increasingly prominent in the health-care sector. It has been used in activities ranging from 'internal market' arrangements in which providers compete for funding from government payers to purchases of medical and non-medical inputs by service providers. While contracting-out arrangements for non-medical services have been widely adopted with apparent success, the co...

In business-to-business relations, contracts serve both as a protection mechanism of trading partners, as well as a prescription document for activities to be executed by the parties. The processes of contract establishment and its enactment are often expensive and time consuming. E-contracting aims at automation of these processes, making them faster and cheaper. For the design of an informati...