Since the early 1990's, IT outsourcing has become a popular strategy with contracts valued at billions of Euro, and durations ranging from five to ten years. Stories in the computing and business press together with reports of analyses by consultants highlight that during the lifetime of some contracts, organisations have reconsidered their original decision to outsource. With this rethink, the...

Ishiguro(2004) shows that discriminatory wage schemes are optimal among collusion-proof contracts under relative performance evaluation when agents collude. However, that analysis depends on the assumption that the agents cannot observe their performances. We investigate how optimal contracts should be modified when the agents observe the realized firm value. We show that the optimal collusion-...

Auctions are supposed to procure the best deal money can buy. Yet, practitioners who procure complex contracts by auction are well aware of some basic pitfalls. One concern is that winning bids may not reflect the quality of the bidder but strategic behavior like low-balling bids or underestimating costs. Such behavior may then lead to demands for contract renegotiation by the winning bidder th...

Policy analysts consider the Netherlands health system a possible model for the United States. Since 2006 all Dutch citizens have to buy standardized individual health insurance coverage from a private insurer. Consumers have an annual choice among insurers, and insurers can selectively contract or integrate with health care providers. Subsidies make health insurance affordable for everyone. A ...

An Artificial Neural Network (ANN) is trained to recognize a buy/sell (long/short) pattern for a particular commodity future contract. The BackPropagation of errors algorithm was used to encode the relationship between the Long/Short desired output and 18 fundamental variables plus 6 (or 18) technical variables into the ANN. Trained on one year of past data the ANN is able to predict long/short...

Background: To interlink the Product Life cycle (PLC) curve of a multiple product with three different scenarios of demand and returns in a closed loop supply chain (CLSC) network. Objective: The purpose of this model is to find the optimal inventory positioning for three different scenario of demand for multiple product at different stages of CLSC during different stages of product lifecycle. ...

In this paper we study the effects that loss contracts—prepayments can be clawed back later—have on group coordination when there is strategic uncertainty. To do so, investigate choices made by experimental subjects in a minimum effort game. control sessions, incentives are formulated as classic gain contract, while treatment framed an isomorphic contract. Contrary to most results contract lite...