Opportunism

About: Opportunism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2030 publications have been published within this topic receiving 97170 citations. The topic is also known as: opportunist.

Beyond the wall of contract text - Visualizing contracts to foster understanding and collaboration within and across organizations

Abstract: In an increasingly networked world, contracts are the glue of business. Contracts are not only legal safeguarding instruments to limit parties' opportunism, as argued by transaction cost economics (TCE). They can be managerial tools to create shared understanding and cooperation among the cross-professional stakeholders who plan, negotiate, and implement contracts – within and across organizations. However, contract documents often do not work well for this purpose: they are long, complex, and hard to understand. As a result, costly misunderstandings arise, since contracts are not optimized for their everyday users: business and technical audiences. The proactive law approach stresses the importance of clear cross-professional communication through contracts to prevent legal problems and seek win-win opportunities. A practical manifestation of this principle is contract visualization – the use of diagrams, images, and visually structured layouts to make contracts more searchable, readable, and understandable. The aim of this study is to provide empirical understanding of the emerging concept and practice of contract visualization – by rigorously testing the propositions about its benefits, by exploring it as a practice unfolding in real life, and by identifying viable approaches for managers and legal counsel to engage with visualization. I chose a mixed methods approach to explore this emerging topic. The quantitative component of the research comprises three experiments, which show that visualized contracts support superior comprehension performance (speed, accuracy) and user preference, compared to informationally equivalent textual contracts. The qualitative component of the research – a single case study – explores how and why an operation and maintenance service sales team decided to employ visualization in their contracts: visualization was sought as a solution to cross-professional, inter-organizational and temporal knowledge gaps, as it allows information to be clarified and positively frames the emerging business relationship. Two conceptual studies exploring visualization approaches (design pattern libraries and automation) complement the empirical studies. The research contributes to the scarce and insufficiently rigorous empirical literature on contract visualization, and to the literature on the psychological effects of contracts and microdynamics of contracting. Theoretically, it suggests a theoretical shift from a TCE-view of contracts to a knowledge-based view of contracts, where the knowledge created and shared through contract documents is a source of competitive advantage. Moreover, it extends the application of cognitive load theory beyond the educational psychology field. The research also has practical implications for global business: visualization was found to especially improve contract comprehension among non-native speakers of English.

Banking union: the disadvantages of opportunism

Abstract: The EU’s approach to what it describes as “banking union” is not what one would design with a clean slate. It reflects the political constraints and the path of history. This paper compares the ins...

Strategies for Successfully Managing Brand–Hotel Relationships

Abstract: Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the study described in this report calls into question the principle that the best way for a brand to ensure that an affiliated hotel conforms to standards is to own that property. Instead, a comparison of opportunistic behavior at 49 brand-owned hotels with that of 247 hotels owned by a third party found that the brand-owned hotels report higher levels of opportunism on the part of hotel managers directed at brand headquarters. The study also revealed conditions that tend to limit opportunism, which is defined as using guile to pursue self-interest. Opportunism is limited when it is easy to monitor hotel performance, and when the brand is able to use opportunism as a form of retaliation. On the other hand, contrary to expectations, the study found no effects of ownership when combined with either emphasis on relational norms or transaction-specific assets to limit hotel opportunism. Ironically, the data indicate that having a third-party owner involved in the arrangement tends to stifle opportunism in the individual property.

Buyer Commitment and Opportunism in the Online Market for it Services

Abstract: 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 bid evaluation to explain this phenomenon. Another possible explanation is that because of the low entry barriers, buyers with a low commitment to exchange can use the marketplace solely for information gath-ering purposes such as price benchmarking and obtaining free consultations, having little or no intention to contract a supplier. We test this explanation by looking at how different types of costs incurred by the buyer during the sourcing process, are related to the outcome of reverse auctions in terms of contract award. We argue that higher levels of search, preparation and negotiation costs are associated with higher commitment to exchange and find that opportunistic behaviour does indeed play a part in the non-contracted projects, while committed buyers are more likely to enter into a contract with a supplier. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of 2,574 reverse auctions at a leading online marketplace for IT services and further verified across projects of different value and different levels of buyer experience. On the practical side, we recommend setting up entry barriers for buyers with a low level of commitment.