Maturing IT Outsourcing Relationships: A Transaction Costs Perspective

Information technology (IT) tends to be viewed as ancillary to core government functions. Consequently, IT is often outsourced to the private sector. Unfortunately, there is a long line of failed outsourced projects. This article uses two New Zealand case studies, the particularly public failure of the recent school payroll system and the successful introduction of electronic immigration processing, to examine how the design and governance of outsourced government IT projects could be improved. It concludes that an awareness of historic trends is important for project success, that governments need to be more active in combating market based transaction costs and that contract management becomes a core government competency when projects are outsourced. It also argues that better change management and cognisance of design-reality gaps would positively impact the outcomes of future projects.

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From transaction costs to transaction value: Overcoming the frictional paradigm

Voprosy Ekonomiki ◽

10.32609/0042-8736-2020-8-51-81 ◽

2020 ◽

pp. 51-81

Author(s):

D. P. Frolov

Keyword(s):

Transaction Costs ◽

Transaction Cost ◽

Path Dependence ◽

Transaction Cost Economics ◽

Cost Minimization ◽

Low Cost ◽

Coase Theorem ◽

Transactional Analysis ◽

Transaction Sector ◽

Transaction Value

The transaction cost economics has accumulated a mass of dogmatic concepts and assertions that have acquired high stability under the influence of path dependence. These include the dogma about transaction costs as frictions, the dogma about the unproductiveness of transactions as a generator of losses, “Stigler—Coase” theorem and the logic of transaction cost minimization, and also the dogma about the priority of institutions providing low-cost transactions. The listed dogmas underlie the prevailing tradition of transactional analysis the frictional paradigm — which, in turn, is the foundation of neo-institutional theory. Therefore, the community of new institutionalists implicitly blocks attempts of a serious revision of this dogmatics. The purpose of the article is to substantiate a post-institutional (alternative to the dominant neo-institutional discourse) value-oriented perspective for the development of transactional studies based on rethinking and combining forgotten theoretical alternatives. Those are Commons’s theory of transactions, Wallis—North’s theory of transaction sector, theory of transaction benefits (T. Sandler, N. Komesar, T. Eggertsson) and Zajac—Olsen’s theory of transaction value. The article provides arguments and examples in favor of broader explanatory possibilities of value-oriented transactional analysis.

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Non-Public Monetary Systems in information Economy

Voprosy Ekonomiki ◽

10.32609/0042-8736-2013-5-151-159 ◽

2013 ◽

pp. 151-159

Author(s):

O. Krasilnikov ◽

E. Krasilnikova

Keyword(s):

Transaction Costs ◽

Information Economy ◽

Internet Technologies ◽

Monetary Systems ◽

Public Money ◽

Economic Institution

The article discusses the development of non-public monetary systems (NPMS), defined as a specific economic institution. It presents their comparison with public money systems depending on the size of transaction costs. The authors come to the conclusion that in conditions of the information economy on the basis of Internet-technologies NPMS receive a new impetus to their development and can make serious competition in regard to public monetary systems.

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Transactions in science in comparative perspective

Voprosy Ekonomiki ◽

10.32609/0042-8736-2018-9-52-69 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 52-69

Author(s):

A. N. Oleinik

Keyword(s):

Transaction Costs ◽

Academic Freedom ◽

North American ◽

Institutional Environment ◽

Scientific Productivity ◽

Institutional Environments ◽

Academic Administrator ◽

The North ◽

American Case ◽

Transactional Approach

The article develops a transactional approach to studying science. Two concepts play a particularly important role: the institutional environment of science and scientific transaction. As an example, the North-American and Russian institutional environments of science are compared. It is shown that structures of scientific transactions (between peers, between the scholar and the academic administrator, between the professor and the student), transaction costs and the scope of academic freedom differ in these two cases. Transaction costs are non-zero in both cases, however. At the same time, it is hypothesized that a greater scope of academic freedom in the North American case may be a factor contributing to a higher scientific productivity.

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