This paper documents the emergence of a large bank loan market in absence contracting institutions: trusted assistant 19th century China. These loans were legally unenforceable, one-shot to poor scholars that funded costs assuming lucrative administrative appointments offering ample opportunities for corruption. The loan’s distinguishing feature was unenforceable stipulation borrower incorporat...

This paper examines complementarity among vertical integration decisions in automobile product development. Though most research assumes that contracting choices are independent of each other, contracting complementarity may arise when governance choices impact the equilibrium degree of coordination among agents. First, effective coordination may depend on the level of (non-contractible) effort...

Primary medical care can be provided either by a bureaucratic hierarchical organization or alternatively by independent contractors. Most members of the caring professions in medicine, nursing, and social work are employed in bureaucracies, whereas general medical practitioners, general dental practitioners, opticians, and pharmacists are independent contractors.The independent contractor statu...

The application of contemporary public sector management concepts and theories allows us to rethink some of our perceptions of the Roman Empire’s rôle as a service provider and the way in which the provision of services was made more efficient. This paper uses the imperial grain supply as a case in point to demonstrate that contracting out allowed the state to take advantage and build on its co...

Several approaches to semantic Web services, including OWLS, SWSF, and WSMO, have been proposed in the literature with the aim to enable automation of various tasks related to Web services, including discovery, contracting, enactment, monitoring, and mediation. The ability to specify processes and to reason about them is central to these initiatives. In this paper we analyze the WSMO choreograp...

BACKGROUND Contracting in private sector is promoted in developing countries facing human resources shortages as a challenge to reduce maternal mortality. This study explored provision, practice, performance, barriers to execution and views about contracting in specialists for emergency obstetric care (EmOC) in rural India. METHODS Facility survey was conducted in all secondary and tertiary p...

I explicitly derive the optimal dynamic incentive contract in a general continuous-time agency problem where inducing static first-best action is not always optimal. My framework generates two dynamic contracts new to the literature: (1) a “quiet-life” arrangement and (2) a suspension-based endogenously renegotiating contract. Both contractual forms induce a mixture of first-best and non-first-...

In this paper, inspired in the field of belief revision, it is presented a novel operation for defining a new logic given a known logic. The operation consists in removing some (maybe undesirable) derived rule from a logic. Besides removing the ‘undesirable’ rule, this operation (called contraction) should change the logic in a minimal way. This paper presents formal definitions for contraction...