Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

There has been a fundamental development in theory and understanding of market, private, collective and public organizations in recent years. This paper incorporates achievements of the interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law,...

What determines the share of public employment, at a given size of the State, in countries of similar levels of economic development? While the theoretical and empirical literature on this issue has mostly considered technical dimensions (efficiency and political considerations), this paper...

In this paper we incorporate interdisciplinary New Institutional and Transaction Costs Economics (combining Economics, Organization, Law, Sociology, Behavioral and Political Sciences), and suggest a framework for analyzing and improvement of governance of socio-economics dynamic of agriculture....

While European health care systems are mostly public and similar the contrast is large to the US health industry based to a large extent in the market. Using competence bloc theory the industrial potential of Swedish and European health care is assessed and compared with US health industry. To...

This work develops an abstract, theory-founded understanding of organization-internal infor­mation security. For this purpose, established knowledge from the field of information security is restructured on the basis of two different dimensions: The historical dimension distinguishes three...

A city establishes a garbage collection company in order to generate revenue, but destroys the business of an existing private garbage collection company in the process by supplanting the private company's customer base. As a general proposition, the private company has no right to complain...

Public choice theorists generally assume that bureaucrats seek to maximize their own utility functions, subject to externally imposed constraints. Changes in constraint values may, therefore, be expected to result in predictable changes in the behavior of most organizations, not just businesses....

This inquiry concludes that America's bloated military base structure results less from demands for political 'pork' than from a decision-making process that inevitably results in a stalemate. This finding is encouraging. With a little imagination, we ought to be able to design a process that...

This essay shows how to align governance mechanisms to achieve public purposes more effectively. First, it explains the alternative governance arrangements employed by public agencies, which boil down to four elementary mechanism designs. Two of the mechanisms (outlay budgets and fixed-price...