As highlighted in the February 2010 Aberdeen study, Transportation Procurement and Payment: Gain Control over Spend, transportation contract management is growing in both importance and scale as more companies (about 60%) have expanded or have plans to expand the global transportation spend they have under contract. In response to this trend, there is an increased interest in outsourcing models...

Introduction In an effort to moderate the unsustainable rate of increase in health care costs and improve the quality of patient care and health outcomes, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts (BCBSMA) introduced in 2009 a new provider payment model called the Alternative Quality Contract (AQC). Hospitals and physicians who enter into the AQC agree to take responsibility for the full continuu...

In project management, most manufacturers (project managers) offer no delayed payment contracts under which each supplier (contractor) will receive a pre-specified payment when she completes her task. However, some manufacturers impose delayed payment contracts under which each supplier is paid only after all suppliers have completed their tasks. In this paper, we investigate whether or not the...

We study delegating a consumer’s treatment plan decisions to an altruistic physician. The physician’s degree of altruism is his private information. The consumer’s illness severity will be learned by the physician, and also will become his private information. Treatments are discrete choices, and can be combined to form treatment plans. We distinguish between two commitment regimes. In the …rst...

The paper presents a stylised model of contracting for a specific health service. The benefit of this service differs across patients. A purchaser, National Health Service (NHS, insurer) offers a contract to providers (hospitals, GP's), under the constraint of limited information about the provider's costs and the contract specifies the payment as a function of the number of cases treated. A nu...

We propose an electronic payment protocol for typical customer-merchant relations which does not require a trusted (signed) payment descriptor to be sent from the merchant to the customer. Instead, the destination “account” number for the payment is solely created on the customer side. This eliminates the need for any encrypted or authenticated communication in the protocol and is secure even i...

Welfare Implications of India’s Employment Guarantee Programme with a Wage Payment Delay* We examine the efficacy of a popular anti-poverty programme, namely the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) of the Government of India. We argue that a chronic friction of wage payment delay in this flagship programme could adversely affect the welfare of the poor through two channels. First, i...

Forming a contract among self-interested agents often requires complex, strategic thinking. For instance, a self-interested agent (contractee) will perform a task for another agent (contractor) only when doing it is in its own interest. Therefore, to form a successful contract, the contractor needs to provide incentives to the contractee, such as proposing a payment higher than the contractee’s...

We study options on short-term leases for capital-intensive equipment performing specific functions and services, such as leases for semi-submersible drilling rigs, marine seismic services, corporate real estate leasing, retail space leasing, and apartment leasing. We quantify the effect of an important factor in pricing options on these services: idle time between consecutive lease contracts. ...