The aim of both marketing theorists and resource-based view proponents is to explain the creation and the sustainability of competitive advantages.1 What has not been considered so far is the role of exploitation positions within the competitive game. The purpose of this article is to investigate the consequences of a strategy concerning the active creation of exploitation positions on the side...

Nevertheless, there are many unanswered questions of a conceptual, theoretical and empirical nature. Even the term ‘transaction cost’ awaits an adequately precise definition. As Williamson (1995, p. 33) himself notes: ‘There is nonetheless a grave problem with broad, elastic and plausible concepts – of which “transaction costs” is one and “power” is another – in that they lend themselves to ex ...

Transaction cost economics (TCE), as developed and operationalized by Oliver Williamson, is one of the most prominent and influential developments in the social sciences. In recent years, on the basis of many empirical studies, it has been claimed that the evidence has corroborated TCE. If so, this would have major implications for the debate between TCE and other approaches to understanding th...

This paper draws on Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) theory (Coase, 1937; Williamson, 1985, 1988, 1999) to examine hotel outsourcing. The study focuses on the uncertainty and frequency attributes, two of three activity attributes that TCE theorists see as affecting the propensity to outsource. Findings relating to the third TCE activity attribute, asset specificity, are reported in Lamminmaki (...

The quality of outsourced IT services can be traced to attributes of the services such as tangibles, responsiveness, reliability, assurance, and empathy. The relative impact of these attributes on client satisfaction varies across different IT services (applications, data center, EUC support, network administration, and help desk), and one or few attributes stand out as “drivers” of client sati...

Using a Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) approach, this paper explores which organizational forms Accountable Care Organizations (ACOs) may take. A critical question about form is the amount of vertical integration that an ACO may have, a topic central to TCE. We posit that contextual factors outside and inside an ACO will produce variable transaction costs (the non-production costs of care) su...