Firms increasingly acquire needed information technology (IT) products and services from external partners. In spite of the ubiquity of IT outsourcing in contemporary organizations, however, theoretical understanding of the dynamics of this phenomenon is limited. A dominant perspective used to explain IT outsourcing is transactions-cost economics (TCE) that focuses attention on efficiency and c...

Consolidation via merger both from hospital-to-hospital mergers and from hospital acquisitions of physician groups is changing the competitive landscape of the provision of health care delivery in the United States. This Article undertakes a legal and economic examination of a recent Ninth Circuit case examining the hospital acquisition of a physician group. This Article explores the Saint Alph...

Information Technology (IT) outsourcing is a major issue facing IT management. IT outsourcing has evolved from outsourcing IT functions externally, to Application Service Provider’s (ASP’s) and now to the next phase of IT outsourcing: utility computing (UC). UC as defined in this research turns computing infrastructure into a flexible, on demand pay per use service. Drawing on theories in trust...

Although considerable research has been conducted into the definition and classification of business models (BM) over the past decade, not much research has focused on the characteristics of transactions with distinct phases in these BMs. Both transaction cost economics and consumer behavior research highlight the relevance of transaction phases. We develop a seven factor framework that differe...

To date, IT outsourcing research has focused on applied problems and case studies. Two bodies of theory offer useful and needed perspectives on both the risks and the factors or variables which affect the risk of outsourcing IT. Transaction cost economics provides a thorough description of the conditions under which the risks of opportunism and inflated transaction costs are high. The Resource-...

This paper presents a model that complements the research stream of transaction cost economics with the dynamic capabilities approach. The paper shows that, even though technological alliances involving specific assets deployed in emerging industries are exposed to high transaction costs, they possess attributes that make them attractive. First, they facilitate the creation of tacit competencie...

There are now hundreds of empirical studies that have confirmed the main predictions of transaction cost economics regarding the alignment of transactions with governance 2001) have noted, there are very few empirical studies that demonstrate the impact of this economizing alignment on performance. Some critics of the theory have noted that in order for the theory to be of relevance to other or...

Gaining economic benefits from substantially lower labor costs has been reported as a major reason for offshoring labor-intensive information systems (IS) services to low-wage countries; however, if wage differences are so high, why is there such a high level of variation in the economic success between offshored IS projects? This study argues that offshore outsourcing involves a number of extr...