This paper introduces a price-fixing policy to be applied to software procurement general contractual agreements occurring between customers and suppliers. The price-fixing policy aims at overcoming the limits and problems of “Function Point fixed-price” mechanisms. Basically the policy derives from a practical application of the "Business Function Point" (BFP) technique. Assigning the price of...

NHS England has announced more plans for reorganising the NHS.1 Patient participation groups were idea of a doctor in 1972 to support work medical practices much same way as parent teacher associations schools. They slow take off, and even though about 75% general practitioners now sign contractual agreement have them, many people don’t know they exist. The reason this apparent reluctance part...

This paper argues that the existence of knowledge-intensive firms pose puzzelments for the contractual theories of the firm. For example, in knowledge-intensive firms physical assets are widely absent, the nature of employment relations and assetownership are much less clear compared to industrial firms. Although knowledge-intensive firms account for a growing share in wealth-creation and emplo...

Few people would disagree with the proposition that horizontal mergers have the potential to restrict output and raise consumer prices. In contrast, there is much less agreement about the anti-competitive effects of vertical mergers. The purpose of this paper is to develop a theoretical model showing how vertical integration changes the nature of competition in upstream and downstream markets a...

This paper reports on computational experiments for an agent based computational economics ACE model of a labor market with choice and refusal of contractual partners and endogenously evolv ing work site behavior Three types of labor market structures are exam ined two sided markets comprising workers and employers partially uid markets comprising pure workers pure employers and agents capable ...

A companies outsource more product design and manufacturing activities to other members of the supply chain, improving end-product quality has become an endeavor extending beyond the boundaries of the firms’ in-house process capabilities. In this paper, we discuss two contractual agreements by which product recall costs can be shared between a manufacturer and a supplier to induce quality impro...

One of the challenges for Internet-based service provisioning is to provide a measure of quality control to the end users. One way to enable this is by having a form of contractual agreement such as employing Service Level Agreement between the customer (end user) and service provider. We argue that such agreement has inherent uncertainty in the form of customer's state of believe towards the c...