Today, many biotechnology firms are using strategic alliances to contract with other companies. In this article, Professor Smith contends that the governance structure of these alliances—specifically, the “contractual board”—provides an integrated restraint on opportunism. While an alliance agreement’s exit structure could provide a check on opportunism by allowing the parties to exit at will, ...

Résumé We use agency theory to shed light on a complex, multiyear outsourcing contract between an important public organization and three major information services outsourcers. The contractual arrangement shows that innovative contracts can be drawn that reduce the scope of supplier opportunism. Nous utilisons la théorie des mandats pour analyser un important et complexe contrat d’impartition....

When a manager, an entrepreneur and outside investors interact under asymmetric information, outsiders limit their stake to eliminate insider cheating; and entrepreneurs offer managers a contractual wage sufficient to deter cheating. When capital is too expensive, this contract is infeasible, and owner-managers rule, otherwise entrepreneurialmanagerial pairs emerge. Individuals with managerial ...

The relevance and impact of the internet on the business-to-business market is widely acknowledged. However, little academic attention has been paid to the adoption of internetbased technology in the Australian franchising sector. Thus this paper addresses the problem: ‘how and why Australian franchise organisations use internet-based technologies in their franchise systems?’ This research uses...

Current approaches for the discovery, specification, and provision of services ignore the relationship between the service contract and the conditions in which the service can guarantee its contract. Moreover, they do not use formal methods for specifying services, contracts, and compositions. Without a formal basis it is not possible to justify through formal verification the correctness condi...

We study the fuel procurement problem for electrical utilities under uncertain demand and market price. Long-term contractual supply commitments are made at a set price with fuel suppliers at the beginning of each year. Each month the procurement planner can use fuel from these contracts or purchase fuel at the current market price. We propose a two-phase heuristic to determine a procurement pl...

We study a contractual design problem between a seller and a buyer where some information correlated with the buyer’s valuation is publicly observed ex-post and the allocation, but not payments, can be made contingent on it. Our analysis shows that, to maximize her profit, the seller should offer one contract in which the good is transferred to the buyer only if the ex-post signal turns out to ...

E-contracts are textual documents describing various contractual assignments/tasksand dependencies among contractual elements such as parties, activities, clauses, exceptions and payments. The dependencies and constraints in e-contract can be differently stated in different parts of large documents. Inconsistencies in the e-contract document, particularly the contract activities and clauses spe...

F iscal regime is one of the main differences between petroleum contracts. Fiscal regimes in oil contracts are divided to two main categories namely Concessionary and Contractual Systems. In contractual systems, the main difference between service and production sharing contracts is the way of compensation of contractor services which could be in cash or in kind. In production sharin...

Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) has become the predominant mode of acquiring information systems services, providing clear evidence that the economics of service delivery favor external service providers over in-house information systems departments. An interesting feature of many large ITO arrangements is that assets necessary for service delivery are transferred to the vendor. The ar...