Background Globally, insufficient information exists on the costs of nursing agencies, which are temporary employment service providers that supply nurses to health establishments and/or private individuals. Objective The aim of the study was to determine the utilisation and direct costs of nursing agencies in the South African public health sector. Design A survey of all nine provincial health...

Multi-contracting practices prevail in many organizations be they public (governments) or private (markets). This article surveys the literature on common agency, a major example of such multi-contracting settings. I first highlight some specific features of common agency games that distinguish them from centralized contracting. Then, I review the tools needed to describe allocations which are ...

Scholars have proposed agency, game, resource-dependency, and transaction cost theories as a means to study outsourcing. Although risks faced by outsourcing firms and developers (i.e., vendors) and corresponding agency costs have been identified, key agency constructs (e.g., firm competence, risk-neutrality of the developer) and their linkage to outsourcing practice (e.g., monitoring, screening...

The current worldwide shortage of nurses is well-documented. This paper describes one organisation's "back to basics" approach to nursing recruitment and the results of a vigorous recruitment program in 2001. Within 12 months, this organisation employed more than 200 new nursing staff, opened 67 beds, reduced agency use by 69% and reduced vacancies by 80%. Based on agency premium costs, there w...

This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition, it generalizes this index to a more general cost function, thereby highlighting the context specificity of t...