Small firms face distinct problems and opportunities when procuring IT resources. Whereas previous work focused at the level of firm or buyer-supplier dyad, we address portfolios of buyer-supplier relationships at an online marketplace for IT services. Using the portfolio approach, we develop a...

The choice of contract allocation mechanism in procurement affects such aspects of transactions as information exchange between buyer and supplier, supplier competition, pricing and, eventually, performance. In this study we investigate the buyer’s choice between reverse auctions and bilateral...

Online markets have dramatically decreased costs of search and communication for buyers. By contrast, costs of evaluating purchasing alternatives have become critical due to an overwhelming range of available options. When high, evaluation costs can offset potential gains from transactions and...

The vertical organization of production entails a range of make-or-buy decisions of intermediate goods that are influenced by the difficulty of writing contracts with a potential supplier. When contracting causes high transaction costs, a firm can decide to vertically integrate the production of...

Finn Wynstra is professor by special appointment in Purchasing and Supply Management at RSM Erasmus University, on behalf of the Dutch Association for Purchasing Management (NEVI) and the 'Vereniging Trustfonds EUR'. He studied Economics at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and conducted his PhD...

This paper attempts to develop concepts of project and contract organization to predict the selection of contract type on infrastructure projects. Conventional wisdom is that at low risk fixed price contracts are best, moving to remeasurement and then cost plus as risk increases. We started...

This paper employs the methodology of Agent-Based Computational Economics (ACE) to investigate under what conditions trust can be viable in markets. The emergence and breakdown of trust is modeled in a context of multiple buyers and suppliers. Agents adapt their trust in a partner, the weight...

Electronic auctions have rapidly increased in popularity, but the consequences of switching to an electronic auction are unclear. In part this is because multiple changes occur at the same time so one can only observe the combined effect of these changes and not the effect of each separate...

Companies increasingly outsource IT-related tasks using reverse auction mechanisms embedded into online marketplaces. However, a considerable proportion of auctions at these marketplaces do not result in a contract between buyer and supplier. Extant literature mostly refers to costly bidding and...

This paper presents a unifying theory, explaining the different relationships between firm size and export intensity that have been found in previous studies. We propose that transaction costs economies and different types of resources induce a moderating effect on the firm size and export...