Services are becoming widely used in the world of engineering and manufacturing as well. Both traditional and computational resources are often encapsulated as Web services, providing the basis for building service-oriented architectures (SOA) based on standards. Services are used on the basis of contractual agreements. A service level agreement (SLA) provides the operational definition of a se...

When used in the health care industry, an MFN clause is a contractual agreement that guarantees a health insurer the same best price as their market competitors. MFN clauses have the effect of unnecessarily raising consumer costs, reducing choice among providers, constraining access to care and preventing the development of alternative health care delivery models. The purpose of this paper is f...

Information security operations ― necessary to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s information systems against attacks ― represent substantial investments in technologies, tools, and human resources. Typically, the relationship between the supplier of an information system and its users is regulated by a Service Level Agreement, and the supplier must de...

In numerous economic scenarios, contracting parties may not have a clear picture of all the relevant aspects. A contracting party may be unaware of what she and/or others are entitled to determine. Therefore, she may reject a contract that is too good to be true. Further, a contracting party may actively exert cognitive effort before signing a contract, so as to avoid being trapped into the con...

Project-financing and public-private partnership schemes are joint projects of investment that are generally submitted to investment valuation criteria based on compound discounting. However, the theoretical basis of these criteria is at issue nowadays. According to recent studies on relational contracting economics and behavioral finance, joint projects of investment can be considered as speci...

In service industries with congestion effects, two very different contractual structures are commonly observed, depending on whether or not firms choose to offer a guaranteed service level. We analyze the impact of these choices onmarket outcomes in oligopolistic industries. Our results highlight howdifferent contractual agreements change the intensity of price competition in service industries...

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of bounded rationality and examines its consequences for contractual design. It is argued that cognition is a natural source of adverse selection in contractual relationships, that contracts may be...