Business-to-business e-contracting gained attention in recent years as a way to improve traditional paper contracting. However, a complete framework specifying the aspects of improvement of traditional paper contracting and the new opportunities introduced by e-contracting is still missing. In this paper, we identify the improvements and the new opportunities introduced by e-contracting. The in...

Political corruption is a type of market failure. One area of public policy where corruption is relatively common is the contracting out of public services. Private firms can improve their chances of obtaining contracts by bribing politicians or public servants and funding political parties. In the same vein, firms can gain access to policy makers by hiring influential former politicians –a pra...

This study examined the effects of outsourcing on employee attitudes to work. The research was conducted in the area of call centre services where there has been a substantial growth in the provision of external suppliers. Findings supported the propositions that outsourced employees had lower organizational commitment and a greater intention to leave their firm than in-house employees. They al...

BACKGROUND A number of developing countries have contracted out public health facilities to the Non-Government Organizations (NGOs) in order to improve service utilization. However, there is a paucity of in-depth qualitative information on barriers to access services as a result of contracting from service users' perspective. The objective of this study was to explore perceived barriers to util...

Business-to-business e-contracting aims at automating the contracting process between companies. It improves the efficiency of the contracting process and enables the introduction of new business models that can be supported by companies. For the development of an e-contracting system, an architecture is required that describes the system components and the communication channels between them. ...

State governments contract with health maintenance organizations (HMOs) to coordinate medical care for nearly 20 million Medicaid recipients. Identifying the causal effect of HMO enrollment on government spending and health care quality is difficult if, as is often the case, recipients have the option to enroll in a plan. To estimate the average effect of HMO enrollment, this paper exploits cou...