Much of the increaseuse of vertical coordinationin [he U.S. swine industry has taken place through contract production. While the incidence of contracting is much higher in nontraditional hog production areas, a growing number of Midwestern producers are being faced with contract options. A variety of contractual arrangements are available through feed companies, integrators, genetics i%-rns,an...

In this paper, we study demand disruption in service supply chain with a client and a vendor. We find the positive demand disruption worse off the double marginalization under wholesale contracts. To address the challenge, we propose a two-part tariff contract under which, the client pays the vendor a fixed fee besides the wholesale price if the service rate was met. The results show the channe...

We present a parametric calculus for contract-based computing in distributed systems. By abstracting from the actual contract language, our calculus generalises both the contracts-as-processes and contracts-as-formulae paradigms. The calculus features primitives for advertising contracts, for reaching agreements, and for querying the fulfilment of contracts. Coordination among principals happen...

In this paper we describe a flexible transactional workflow environment based on an extensible object-oriented framework built around class libraries, application programming interfaces, and shared services. To enforce coordination in workflow communications and model real-life business applications, the concepts of 'obligation' and 'contract' are introduced. A contract is a semantic agreement ...

— This study argues that the coordination of workplace changes brought about by increased flexibility attained through the utilization of contract labor is fraught with tension, which influences the ways in which employment relationships are shaped in the context of any given firm. The essence of such tension lies in the pursuit of organizational flexibility and quality control in the productio...

An object's type is usually regarded as a contract between the object and each of its users. However, in concurrent (and sometimes also in sequential) systems it is more useful to regard a type as a contract between an object and the unity of all users: The users must be coordinated before sending messages to the object. Types in the proposed model express requirements on the coordination of us...

We concentrate on a principal and agent system often seen in supply chain management studies. Under reasonable conditions, we show that a nearly systematic three-step method can be used to find coordination contracts for the system. The number of terms involved in our contract is in some sense positively correlated with the degree of information asymmetry between the principal and agent. Severa...

In multiagent systems, achieving coordination among autonomous agents is a major problem. Generally, a high-level protocol needs to be designed to achieve effective coordination. In the field of distributed artificial intelligence, protocols for achieving coordination have been proposed, such as the contract net protocol for task allocation (Smith 1980), and the multistage negotiation protocol ...

Even if collaboration is considered an effective solution to improve business strategies, SMEs often lack common principles and common forms of contractual coordination. Several policies implemented by E.U. have addressed the setup of a comprehensive SME policy framework. However, European institutions seem to have focused more on organizational devices to conduct business activities rather tha...

In many application areas (such as concurrent engineering, software development, hospital scheduling, manufacturing scheduling, and military planning), individuals are responsible for an agenda of tasks and face choices about the best way to locally handle each task, in what order to do tasks, and when to do them. Such decisions are often hard to make because of coordination problems: individua...