Contract Renewal Research Articles

공동주택 관리소장의 서번트 리더십이 입주자만족도와 관리업체 재계약율에 미치는 영향

This study aims to verify the effects of the apartment office managers' servant leadership on the residents' satisfactions and housing management company contract renewal ratio, and to examine whether the number of apartment units and the apartments' average size have the moderating effects upon the relationship between servant leadership and the residents's satisfaction and housing management company contract renewal ratio. For the purpose of testing the hypotheses, the questionnaire survey was conducted targeting 1,000 apartment office staffs and 8,000 apartment residents of 200 apartment complex in the region of Ulsan, Kyungnam, and Busan, and the statistical analyses were carried out for the useful questionnaires of 961 apartment office staffs and 7,119 apartment residents. The main results are as follows: First, the higher the office managers servant leadership is, the higher the residents' satisfactions. Second, the number of apartment units and the average size have moderating effects on the relationship between the office managers' servant leadership and housing management company contract renewal ratio. Finally, the summary, implications, and limitations of this study, and the future research direction were discussed in the conclusion.

Viral hepatitis C serological and behavioral survey among single male laborers in Qatar

Background: Hepatitis C viral infection is a public health concern worldwide and a major cause of morbidity and mortality in several countries that supply the State of Qatar with many of its laborers. The objectives were to measure the prevalence of hepatitis C viral infection among single male laborers; detect the practices that may catalyze the spread of the infection; and assess the knowledge gap. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in 2014 and involved 504 expatriate single male laborers seeking health care in two Qatar Red Crescent health centers. Results: Results showed that only 5% of the total participants have ever been tested for hepatitis C and positive serology was detected in 4 respondents (0.8%), three of them from Egypt and one from Nepal. Three out of the 4 positive cases did not know they were infected and 2.5% lived with someone harboring the infection. Respondents appeared to have varying healthcare needs with 57% subject to medical procedures outside Qatar. Various risk practices for hepatitis C infection were reported including ear/body piercing (21.9%), tattooing (13.3%), contact with blood (17.0%), sharing personal equipment (12.2%) and injecting with used needles or syringes (7.4%). Less than 40% of respondents had knowledge of all modes of hepatitis C transmission. Conclusion: Further actions notably building HCV monitoring system, setting a prevention plan, building screening strategy were need to be complemented by a contract renewal or a 3-year screening policy.

Can “Temps” Secure Future Employment? Investigating the Relationship Between Proactive Behaviors and Employers’ Rehiring Decision

This study examines how the adoption of proactive socialization behaviors by temporary agency workers is related to contract renewal intention of the supervisor in the client organization in which they are assigned. We propose that the adoption of such behaviors will be associated with a favorable performance evaluation from the supervisor in the client organization, and in turn, to his or her contract renewal intention through two mechanisms, namely, role clarity and leader–member exchange (LMX), which refers to the quality of the relationship between the temporary worker and his or her supervisor. Data were collected from 217 worker–supervisor dyads. Results indicate that information-seeking behavior is related to performance evaluation through role clarity. This indirect relationship is however negative, as greater role clarity relates negatively to performance evaluation. Our results also show that LMX acts as a mediator between feedback seeking, boss-relationship building, and performance. Finally, favorable performance evaluation is positively associated with contract renewal intention.

Risk assessment of outsourcing e-procurement services: integrating SWOT analysis with a modified ANP-based fuzzy inference system

With electronic procurement solutions becoming increasingly sophisticated, many firms opt to source these services from third-party providers, effectively transferring (outsourcing) significant responsibility to these services companies. This action, however, entails certain risks, which are oftentimes difficult to assess. To guide managerial practice and to advance academic inquiry in this domain, we identify e-procurement risk factors through a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats analysis, grounded in transaction cost economics (TCE), and propose a risk assessment framework based on the opinions of a group of experts. The approach taken is that of a modified analytic network process methodology, combined with a fuzzy inference system, which is versatile enough to accept the expert opinions in different input formats (such as linguistic variables and ranges). The proposed framework has the capability to aggregate expert judgements’ to estimate risk likelihoods, risk severities and risk factor indices, and derive overall risk magnitudes. The multi-method approach was motivated and is illustrated by a real-life case study of an Indian manufacturing company currently in the process of contract renewal with its existing e-procurement service provider.

New and Revised Results for 'Building Reputation for Contract Renewal: Implications for Performance Dynamics and Contract Duration'

In this paper we present some new results for the dynamic agent model by Iossa and Rey (2014, Building Reputation for Contract Renewal: Implications for Performance Dynamics and Contract Duration,'' Journal of the European Economic Association, 12, 549−574) while also correcting some errors in that article. Iossa and Rey study the performance of an agent who repeatedly receives multi-period contracts and determine the optimal duration of such contracts in the context of an infinitely repeated multi-period agent model. We amend the characterization of the unique Markov perfect equilibrium for this model. In addition, we review the original welfare analysis of the model and either provide corrected proofs when possible or provide counterexamples. Our counterexamples overturn the main comparative statics results of the original analysis. We demonstrate that both the agent's optimal investment decision and the optimal contract duration depend non-monotonically on the information persistence and the agent's discount factor. In the final part of the analysis, we establish new results on the agent's optimal investment decision.

Incentives to Invest in Short-Term vs Long-Term Contracts: Theory and Evidence

Abstract We study the effects of the change in contract length on the agents’ incentives to invest and exert effort. We present an agent’s dynamic decision model that explicitly deals with two types of investments and directly allows for contract regime switching by varying the probability of contract renewal. The fact that the unobservable investment in human capital is complementary with the agent’s effort produces a result that increasing the probability of contract renewal increases investment and effort, with the consequent increase in production. We also show that there exists a specific level of investment in human capital, for which the investment in physical capital is profitable. We test these theoretical predictions using contract settlement data for the production of hatching eggs which covers the period when the contract changed from short-term to long-term. The obtained empirical results are largely supportive of the developed theory.

The effect of contract renewal and competitive tendering on public transport costs, subsidies and ridership

In this paper, we aim to estimate the effect of contract renewal as well as competitive tendering on public transport costs, subsidies, and ridership. More specifically, we examine to what extent (multiple) contract renewals and introduction of competitive tendering for long-term public transport contracts affect ridership, operational costs and subsidies in concession areas governed by public transportation authorities from 2001 until 2013 in the Netherlands. Our identification strategy improves on the literature as we are able to control for all time-invariant unobserved factors, such as network and area characteristics by using panel data. We show that when renewing long-term contracts, operational costs are reduced by at least 10%, whereas subsidies fall even stronger. For contracts that are renewed at least twice, the reduction in costs is even more substantial and in the order of 16%. We find that the effect of competitive tendering is completely absent, suggesting that the threat of competitive tendering is sufficient in a market where the majority of concessions is competitive tendered. Contract renewal not only reduces costs and subsidies, but simultaneously increases public transport ridership by 7.7%. Furthermore the vehicle-hours elasticity of operational costs is 0.40, pointing to strong economies of density. The geographical scale elasticity of operational costs is around one, which indicates constant returns to scale with respect to the geographical size of the concession area. This suggest that the current size of the Dutch concession area is optimal with respect to costs.

Valuing Investment Management Fees, Active Portfolio Management, and Closed-End Fund Discounts

Risk-neutral valuation is used to value a portfolio and decompose it into the components accruing to its stakeholders. The analysis incorporates managers’ expected performance and contract renewal issues. A managed portfolio’s economic value is shown to differ from its net asset value. A better foundation for computing fair closed-end fund discounts and a partial explanation of equilibrium in the markets for open and closed-end mutual funds are provided. Tests on the behavior of net redemptions following closed-end fund open-endings and the relation between premiums and investment performance around IPOs strongly support the paper’s theory.

“¿De dónde eres realmente?” Apuntes sobre las ciencias sociales y la “crisis de la sociedad homogénea”

Partiendo del trabajo de Alfonso Pérez-Agote sobre la formación y “crisis” del “presupuesto de la homogeneidad” de las sociedades occidentales modernas, este texto interroga los límites de las ciencias sociales y más concretamente de la sociología dominante para interpretar esta “crisis” y el cambio social al que está asociada. Más específicamente, cuestiona el lugar que la categoría raza ha tenido en la sociología, como una perspectiva analítica crucial a la hora problematizar las narrativas hegemónicas sobre la modernidad, la formación del Estado-Nación y la construcción de la idea de Europa. Se argumenta que la comprensión de las llamadas “crisis del multiculturalismo” o “crisis de la integración de la inmigración” en la actualidad, requiere otorgar centralidad a la renovación del <em>contrato racial </em>como la ingeniería política de la pertenencia a la europeidad.

2014 Rural Clinical School Training and Support Program Snapshot survey

The Rural Clinical Training and Support (RCTS) program is an Australian Government initiative to address the shortage of medical practitioners within rural and remote Australia. There is a large amount of published information about the RCTS program and rural medical student cohorts who have undertaken short- and long-term rotations. However, very little is known about the academic and professional staff involved in the program, a knowledge gap that may impact workforce and succession planning. To address this, the Federation of Rural Australian Medical Educators (FRAME) initiated the pilot 2014 RCTS Snapshot survey to obtain data on the current RCTS workforce. All professional, academic and clinical academic staff (fixed-term and continuing, regardless of fraction) employed through the RCTS program were invited to complete a short, web-based survey. The survey was conducted from March to June 2014. The quantitative variables in the survey included demographics (age and gender), rural background and exposure, employment history in rural/regional areas and at rural clinical schools (RCS), experience and expertise, reasons for working at RCS, and future employment intentions. The last three questions also were of a qualitative open-ended format to allow respondents to provide additional details regarding their reasons for working at RCSs and their future intentions. The estimated total RCTS workforce was 970. A total of 413 responses were received and 316 (40.9%) complete responses analysed. The majority of respondents were female (71%), the 40-60-year age group was predominant (28%), and professional staff constituted the majority (62%). The below 40-year age group had more professionals than academics (21% vs 12%) and more than 62% of academics were aged above 50 years. Notably, there were no academics aged less than 30 years. The percentage of professional staff with a rural background was higher (62%) than that of academics with a rural background (42%). However, more than 70% of academics had previous exposure to a rural area as an adult and 32% had an exposure as a part of university or the TAFE (technical and further education) system. More than half (62%) of RCTS academics were aged more than 50 years and thus approaching retirement age. The implementation of a FRAME-sponsored leadership and succession program was considered by most staff (84%) as one strategy that could be used to prevent a future shortage of academics. Lifestyle reasons for working at an RCS were common to both academic (54%) and professional (63%) staff. A passion for rural health and building capacity within the rural health workforce were other central themes to emerge from the qualitative data. Uncertainty around contract renewal and future funding were dominant themes to emerge from respondents regarding their future employment intentions within the RCTS program. This study has provided valuable insights into the professional and academic staff's views and aspirations about the RCTS program. These data on the current RCTS workforce provide a benchmark to which future surveys of the workforce can be compared to monitor trends in turnover or predict future shortages due to cohort ageing.

Health club attendance, expectations and self-control

We use a unique dataset on health club attendance from Montreal (Canada) to look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance, and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. Consistently with previous studies, a vast majority of contract choices are unlikely to be compatible with time-consistent behavior. For 56.83% of members, the actual cost per visit with the contract is higher than the pay-per-visit option. Conditional on paying more with a subscription, we calculate that the median cost of choosing a long-term contract over the per-visit option is $346.45, excluding any commitment value. However, we compute that nearly all members would have paid less with the long-term contract if they had exercised as often as they initially planned. We study how actual attendance following contract choice is related to baseline reports of self-control. We find that reports of self-control problems are associated with low future attendance and with faster decrease in attendance, in particular after New Year, but not with expected attendance. Our results are consistent with a model of health club participation where agents underestimate the severity of their self-control problems. We find that individuals with a large gap between expected and realized attendance have a lower probability of contract renewal which has implications for mechanism design to retain customers.

IaaS reserved contract procurement optimisation with load prediction

The increased adoption of cloud computing, combined with the recent proliferation of pricing plans has increased the relevance of automating the complex and time consuming tasks of selecting, procuring and managing cloud resources. In this work, we present an approach to automate the procurement decision of reserved contracts in the context of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) providers. Such reserved contracts offer the consumer a significant price reduction compared to pay-per-hour pricing models, in exchange for an upfront payment. We present an algorithm that uses load prediction to make cost-efficient purchasing decisions, and evaluate whether the use of automated time series forecasting proves useful in this context. The algorithm takes into account a wide range of contract types as well as the organisation’s current contract portfolio. We evaluate the effectiveness of different contract renewal policies and load predictors based on ARIMA, Holt–Winters and exponential smoothing techniques, and compare these with the performance of a simple predictor. We adopt a large set of 51 real-world web application load traces to evaluate the performance and scalability of our algorithm through simulation. Our results show that the algorithm is able to significantly reduce IaaS resource costs through automated reserved contract procurement, but that the use of advanced prediction techniques only proves beneficial in specific cases. The algorithms scalability is shown to be sufficient for its adoption in settings with a large number of contracts.

“(MA)LINGERING ON THE DISABLED LIST”

In this article, we examine two offsetting incentives that may affect a baseball player's willingness to play with injuries. We allow for the usual disincentive effects associated with long‐term contracts, while also incorporating the importance of the incentives associated with contract renewal. Our results are consistent with the previous work that showed those likely to retire at the end of their current contracts have an increased incentive to shirk. For those who expect to re‐sign a subsequent contract, however, we find that players tend to step up their effort as they approach the final year of their contract. (JEL L83)

Dropping out of Ethiopia's community-based health insurance scheme.

Low contract renewal rates have been identified as one of the challenges facing the development of community-based health insurance (CBHI) schemes. This article uses longitudinal household survey data gathered in 2012 and 2013 to examine dropout in the case of Ethiopia's pilot CBHI scheme. We treat dropout as a function of scheme affordability, health status, scheme understanding and quality of care. The scheme saw enrolment increase from 41% 1 year after inception to 48% a year later. An impressive 82% of those who enrolled in the first year renewed their subscriptions, while 25% who had not enrolled joined the scheme. The analysis shows that socioeconomic status, a greater understanding of health insurance and experience with and knowledge of the CBHI scheme are associated with lower dropout rates. While there are concerns about the quality of care and the treatment meted out to the insured by providers, the overall picture is that returns from the scheme are overwhelmingly positive. For the bulk of households, premiums do not seem to be onerous, basic understanding of health insurance is high and almost all those who are currently enrolled signalled their desire to renew contracts.

Collective Bargaining Agreement Provisions in the Wake of Ohio Teacher Evaluation System Legislation

Guided by Honig and Hatch’s conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we analyzed the first teacher collective bargaining agreements negotiated after the enactment of the Ohio Teacher Evaluation System to understand how state law has shaped provisions for teacher evaluation, compensation, reductions in force (RIF), transfers, and contract renewal. We found surprising variation in provisions across districts. Most notable was how districts defined comparable evaluations in making RIF decisions. Bridging districts provided the greatest protections for the most accomplished teachers, regardless of seniority. In contrast, buffering districts have RIF provisions based on seniority.

The Contract Year Phenomenon in the Corner Office: An Analysis of Firm Behavior During CEO Contract Renewals

This paper investigates how executive employment contracts influence corporate financial policies during the final year of the contract term, using a new, hand-collected data set of CEO employment agreements. On the one hand, the impending expiration of fixed-term employment contracts creates incentives for CEOs to engage in strategic window-dressing activities. We find that, compared to normal periods, CEOs manage earnings more aggressively when they are in the process of contract renegotiations. Correspondingly, during CEO contract renewal times, firms are more likely to report earnings that meet or narrowly beat analyst consensus forecasts. Moreover, CEOs also reduce the amount of negative firm news released during their contract negotiation years. On the other hand, we find that merger and acquisition deals announced during the contract renegotiation year yield higher announcement returns than deals announced during other periods, suggesting that the upcoming contract expiration and renewal can also have disciplinary effects on potential value-destroying behaviors of CEOs. In addition, we show that firms whose CEOs are not subject to contract renewal pressure do not experience such corporate policy changes and that CEOs who engage in manipulation during contract renewal obtain better employment terms in their new contracts, in terms of contract length, severance payment, and salary and bonus. Overall, our results indicate that job uncertainty created by expiring employment contracts induces changes in managerial behaviors that have significant impacts on firm financial activities and outcomes.

Short-Term Debt Maturity and Accruals-Based Earnings Management in Tehran Stock Exchange (Iranian Evidence)

Firms face the possibility of a debt run when bad news about the firm is coupled with large amount of debt maturing within a short period of time (short-term debt). To avoid such debt run threats, or to further the possibility of debt contract renewal, firms have strong incentives to project an image of strong financial health. 110 companies from the companies listed in Tehran Stock Exchange during the 5 year period between 2008 to 2012 were reviewed. Opportunistic behavior is proxied by accruals-based earnings management which is measured in terms of absolute value of discretionary accruals. Using a sample of 550 firm-years, we find that the coefficient for short-term debt is negatively associated with discretionary accruals for low creditworthy firms. The result show that firm's financial strength have a decreasing role on the effect of debt maturity on earnings management. This result is not consistent with our expectation that firms with higher creditworthiness (investment grade firms) are associated with more monitoring benefits of short-term debt. In addition to ordinary least squares regressions that include controls for industry, and year fixed-effects, we also report results using panel data fixed effects to control for firm and year fixed effects. By establishing the relation between earnings management and debt maturity structure, we suggest another important factor that must be taken into account when studying earnings management.

Health Club Attendance, Expectations and Self-Control

Using a unique dataset on health club attendance from Quebec, we look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. We find that a large majority of contract choices appear inconsistent purely on financial grounds: 47.5% of members would be better off paying the fee for a single visit each time they go to the gym rather than signing a long-term contract. The median total cost of making a mistake on this decision is $262. We then compute that almost all members have made the right decision once we use subjective expectations of the number of visits per week at the time of contract choice. Next, we study how actual attendance following contract choice is related to baseline reports of self-control. We find that reports of self-control problems at baseline are associated with low future attendance and that attendance decreases faster, in particular after New Year. Finally, those with a large gap between expected and realized attendance have a much lower probability of contract renewal. Our results are consistent with a model of health club participation where agents underestimate the severity of their self-control problems.

Adjuncts and the Academic Labor Force

Adjuncts and the Academic Labor Force

Variable Impact of State Legislative Advocacy on Registry Participation and Regional Systems of Care Implementation

Regionalization, systems of care design, and quality improvement (QI) registry participation all promote the widespread dissemination of guideline-based evidence into actual practice. As a result, policy statements from the American Heart Association/American Stroke Association (AHA/ASA) advocate for the creation of regional systems of care for various time-critical diagnoses, including ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), out-of-hospital cardiac arrest resuscitation, and acute stroke.1–3 Creation of these regional networks requires multidisciplinary collaboration to implement 5 mutually reinforcing core elements4 that build each system: (1) Designation of certain hospitals with special treatment capabilities as Receiving Centers for STEMI, resuscitation, or stroke; (2) emergency medical services (EMS) destination protocols that allow for direct transport of certain patients identified by explicit triage criteria to a designated Receiving Center, thus allowing for bypass of closer hospitals if they lack the needed specialty service; (3) organized interhospital transfer and transport protocols to a Receiving Center for appropriate patients who initially self-present or are mistriaged to a Referral Hospital; (4) communication or telemedicine options to provide real-time expert consultation as needed from a Receiving Center to its associated Referral Hospitals or EMS providers; and (5) participation in a regional and/or national QI registry to track relevant process-of-care metrics and meaningful risk-adjusted clinical outcomes. Within each of the 50 states, unique challenges exist for stakeholders attempting to implement the 5 aforementioned core elements of regional or statewide systems of care. In particular, substantial variation exists with regard to the starting point for these initiatives. For example, some states already have sufficient regulatory authority within their EMS agency or state department of health (DOH) to regionalize care of time-critical diagnoses, whereas other states require new legislation to create coordinated systems. In October 2011, the Advocacy Coordinating Committee of the AHA convened a multispecialty task force to assess the …