— 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...

Over the last decades, scholars have paid consistent attention to the concepts of flexible work. This reflects the growing relevance of flexible work patterns in practice. The general assumption is that flexible work arrangements enable an organization to adapt its workforce to changes in the working environment, which is mainly based on Atkinson’s (1984) groundbreaking ‘flexible firm’ model. I...

Economics; he would like to thank that institution for its hospitality. Abstract We view a contract as a list of outcomes. Ex ante, the parties commit not to consider outcomes not on the list, i.e., these are " ruled out ". Ex post, they freely bargain over outcomes on the list, i.e., the contract specifies no mechanism to structure their choice; in this sense outcomes on the list are not " rul...

I investigate whether and how expected future contract renegotiation considerations affect the type of covenants used in ex-ante debt contracts. Using an instrumental variables methodology, I find that when future contract renegotiation costs are expected to be high, debt contracts are less likely to include covenants that restrict the borrower’s financial flexibility. This finding suggests tha...

because of high speed, efficiency, robustness and flexibility of multi-agent systems, in recent years there has been an increasing interest in the art of these systems. in competitive multi agent systems, a mechanism is required via which the agents can come to reach an agreement.  contract net protocols are one of the well-known negotiation protocols in multi-agent systems. in contract net pro...

One of the most important things in pursuit of supply chain management is to prevent sub-optimization caused by decentralized decision making over the various entities. As a solution of the issue, supply chain coordination approach has frequently been used. However, a coordinated supply chain might fail to provide additional profit to one of the players. A supply chain contract can be to achiev...

M firms in capital-intensive industries face inherent demand volatility for their products and the inability to change their capacity quickly. To cope with these challenges, manufacturers often enter into contracts with their customers that offer greater certainty of supply in return for more predictable orders. In this paper, we study a “forecast-commitment” contract in which the customer prov...

The new training literature suggests that in a monopsonistic market employers will not only pay for fi rm-specifi c training but also for general training if the risk of poaching is limited. This implies that training participation should decrease when competition for employees is higher among fi rms. Using worker level data for Germany we fi nd that the hypothesis is supported empirically. Spe...