Government/business relations: an agency-theory perspective on the procurement of market research

Abstract

The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide a brief description and review of the agency theory literature in ultimately proposing that agency theory may provide a novel and potentially useful foundation for analysing (for researchers) and influencing (for managers) the nature of contractual relations between government departments that secure the services of commercial market research firms. The methodological approach involves a non-exhaustive review of literature addressing agency theory and public sector procurement from commercial sources. Although this paper is primarily targeted at academics with an interest in studying the relationships between market research providers and public sector market research users, there are some practical managerial implications that are discussed. Thus far in the extant marketing literature, there has been no suggestion that an agent theoretical perspective can contribute to both the study and management of government/business relationships related to the procurement of market research.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.