As the scope and complexity of information technology outsourcing expand, the importance of the number of vendors adopted by a client is rising. What are the reasons why some companies contract with a single vendor while others contract with several? While there has been considerable research on this issue, we still lack a systematic understanding of why firms utilize different numbers of vendo...

Christian Neureiter 1,*, Dominik Engel 1,† and Mathias Uslar 2,† 1 Josef Ressel Center for User-Centric Smart Grid Privacy, Security and Control, University of Applied Sciences Salzburg, Urstein Süd 1, 5412 Puch, Salzburg, Austria; [email protected] 2 Institute for Information Technology Oldenburg (OFFIS), Escherweg 2, 26121 Oldenburg, Germany; [email protected] * Corresponde...

This study examine the perceived psychological contract from the perspectives of IT new recruits that are located in USA and China. Psychological contract emphasize the mutual exchange between employees and employers. The results of this exploratory study reveals that IT employees from China and USA hold many similar beliefs on the employer-employee obligations such as employer obligations to h...

An evaluation problem exists when winding up executory contracts in case of insolvency. The trustee has difficulties in accurately considering the claim for damages that arises if he chooses to reject a contract instead of accepting it. An unequal treatment of creditors and inefficiencies follow. However, a simple reform can solve this problem. If an executory contract is accepted by the truste...

Organizations are increasingly turning to outsourcing for software development, in part, to control cost and lower the likelihood of project failure. However, application outsourcing is not without risk. Milestones coupled with gateway reviews are a common mechanism for controlling these risks. Yet, the benefit of milestones must be assessed in light of their associated costs. This paper uses r...

Commercial surrogate-motherhood contracts should be legally enforceable, despite the vociferous and prevalent opposition to them. We shall, in particular, argue here that they do not involve the commodification of children, nor in other ways are they contrary to the interests of the children concerned. Our case is developed in response to criticisms of arguments we have made before in defense o...

This article discusses the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can hold up the agent, undermining the agent’s investment incentives. We begin by identifying a countervailing effect: ...

O personalization services belong to a class of economic goods with a “no free disposal” (NFD) property where consumers do not always prefer more services to less because of the privacy concerns. These concerns arise from the revelation of information necessary for the provision of personalization services. We examine vendor strategies in a market where consumers have heterogeneous concerns abo...

This paper describes two different ways of understanding operation contracts in conceptual modeling: the strict and the extended interpretations. The main difference between them lies in the way operation postconditions and integrity constraints are guaranteed. Understanding an operation contract under each of these interpretations can result in different semantics for the same specification. T...

Can libraries written without explicit support for Design by ContractTM in the language or the method benefit from a posteriori addition of contracts? To help answer this question, we performed an empirical study of library classes from the .NET Collections library, which doesn’t use Design by Contract, to search for unexpressed contracts. This article reports on what we have found, and discuss...