TRANSACTION COSTS AND CONTRACTING: The Practitioner Perspective

Trevor L. Brown · Matthew Potoski

215 citations0/0 files stored

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Public Policy and Administration Research Public Procurement and Policy Outsourcing and Supply Chain Management

Abstract

Abstract: An important decision confronting public managers is choosing when to contract for service delivery. We focus on two service characteristics that transaction cost theory suggests may influence the chances of contract success. Asset specificity is the extent to which resources applied to delivering a service can be applied to other services and ease of measurement is the extent to which the quality and quantity of service outcomes and outputs can be easily gauged. Drawing on a survey of public managers ’ perceptions of these dimensions for sixty-four common municipal services, we review previous studies of contracting to investigate how these two transaction costs factors influence governments’ decisions about whether to contract, how to manage contracts, and when contracting is likely to be successful. Our survey and review sheds light on how public managers should manage contracting and how scholars should further investigate this important subject.

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

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

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 215 citations exist upstream.

References

1937The Nature of the Firm 1993Calculativeness, Trust, and Economic Organization 1984Congressional Oversight Overlooked: Police Patrols versus Fire Alarms 1996Bad for Practice: A Critique of the Transaction Cost Theory 1995A Preliminary Theory of Interorganizational Network Effectiveness: A Comparative Study of Four Community Mental Health Systems 1992Understanding and Managing Public Organizations 1997The Proper Scope of Government: Theory and an Application to Prisons 2000Governing the Hollow State

Cited by

2010Is private production of public services cheaper than public production? A meta-regression analysis of solid waste and water services 2012Does Cooperation Reduce Service Delivery Costs? Evidence from Residential Solid Waste Services 2015Rethinking New Public Management Delivery Forms and Efficiency: Long-Term Effects in Spanish Local Government: Table 1 2017Regional Governance and Institutional Collective Action for Environmental Sustainability 2011The Many Faces of Asset Specificity: A Critical Review of Key Theoretical Perspectives

Explore the map →

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

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.