Innovation is essential for sustaining growth and economic development in a world that faces population increase, natural resource depletion, and environmental challenges. Incentives play a critical role in innovation because the required research and development activities are costly, and the resulting knowledge has the attributes of a public good. This paper discusses the economics of institu...

Various theories make predictions about the relative advantages of individual loans versus joint liability loans. If we imagine that lenders facing moral hazard make relative performance comparisons in determining stringency in repayment, then individual loans should vary positively with covariance of output across funded projects. Relatively new work also highlights inequality and heterogeneit...

The outsourcing of Information Technology (IT) services is a practice generally regulated by contracts. Since contracts are inevitably incomplete, buyer-supplier relationships are usually managed by additional mechanisms of incentives and governance, which results in a variety of success levels. Buyer perceived volatility and ambiguity of the future relationship are argued to be keys in definin...

We explore the potential of adding objective functions to OCL operation contracts. If an operation contract includes an objective function, the operation has the obligation to yield results that make the objective function assume an optimal value. Thus, an objective function expresses a preference among the possible operation results that conform to the postconditions of the operation contract ...

We extend a previously proposed symbolic model transformation property prover for the DSLTrans transformation language. The original prover generated the set of path conditions (i.e., symbolic transformation executions), and verified atomic contracts (constraints on inputoutput model relations) on these path conditions. The prover evaluated atomic contracts to yield either true or false for the...

Introduction Integrated care systems are advocated as an effective method of improving the performance of healthcare systems. These systems outline a payment and care delivery model that intends to tie provider reimbursements to predefined quality metrics. Little is known about the contractual design and the main challenges of delegating "accountability" to these new kinds of organisations and/...

In object-oriented (OO) programming, variables do not contain objects directly but ad-dresses of objects on the heap. Thus, several variables can point to the same object; wecall this aliasing.Aliasing is a central feature of OO programming that enables efficient sharing of objectsacross a system. This is essential for the implementation of many programming idioms,such as it...

We study the agency problem between a firm and its research employees. In a multi-agent contracting setting, we show explicitly the way in which the optimal incentive regime is a function of how agents’ efforts interact with one another: relative-performance evaluation is used when their efforts are substitutes whereas joint-performance evaluation is used when their efforts are complements. We ...

We analyze the structure and pricing of option contracts for an industrial good in the presence of spot trading. We combine the analysis of spot trading and buyers’ disparate private valuations for different suppliers’ products, and jointly endogenize the determination of three major dimensions in contract design: (i) sales contracts versus options contracts; (ii) flat-price versus volume-depen...