Multiple types of psychological contracts : a six-cluster solution.

The purpose of this study is to empirically examine the existence of particular types of psychological contracts. We take a feature-oriented approach towards psychological contracts, which allows more generalizability across settings than content-oriented assessments. In defining the types of psychological contracts, we rely on 10 dimensions that indicate the employees' expected entitlements as well as their expected obligations towards their employer. We assess the existence of types of psychological contracts based upon an economy-wide, representative sample. The analysis indicates the existence of six types of psychological contracts, all having different patterns of mutual expectations: an instrumental psychological contract, a weak psychological contract, a loyal psychological contract, an unattached psychological contract, an investing psychological contract and a strong psychological contract. Based on the profiles of the six types and its number of respondents, we conclude that the so-called transformation from traditional employment relationships towards 'new deals' is restricted to a very small group of young and highly educated professionals and managers.Employment; Expected; Managers; Studies;

Six types of psychological contracts: their affective commitment and employability.

The purpose of this study is to identify a variety of employment relationships based upon an economy-wide, representative sample. We turn to psychological contract studies examining different types of psychological contracts. We expand two existing typologies by incorporating multiple features or underlying dimensions of psychological contracts. Such a feature-oriented approach allows us to construct a meaningful conceptualization of employer and employee obligations across different settings and to identify multiple types of psychological contracts in which combinations of different dimensions are prevalent. The cluster analysis indicates the existence of six types of psychological contracts, all having different patterns of mutual expectations: an instrumental, weak, loyal, unattached, investing and strong psychological contract. To validate the six-cluster solution, we develop clusters' profiles based upon individual, job, formal contract and organizational characteristics and further differentiate between the clusters by examining their outcomes in terms of affective commitment and employability.Characteristics; Cluster analysis; Contracts; Employability; Employment; Studies;

Are flexible contracts bad for workers? Evidence from job satisfaction data

If workers can choose between permanent and flexible contracts, compensating wage differentials should arise to equalize on-the-job utility in the two types of contracts. Estimating job satisfaction using the British Household Panel Survey shows that agency and casual contracts are associated with routinely lower satisfaction. This results because the low job satisfaction associated with less job security is not offset by higher compensation or other job characteristics. Job security is sufficiently important that holding constant this one facet of satisfaction eliminates the overall gap in job satisfaction between flexible and permanent contracts

The UK market for energy service contracts in 2014–2015

This paper provides an overview of the UK market for energy service contracts in 2014 and highlights the growing role of intermediaries. Using information from secondary literature and interviews, it identifies the businesses offering energy service contracts, the sectors and organisations that are purchasing those contracts, the types of contract that are available, the areas of market growth and the reasons for that growth. The paper finds that the UK market is relatively large, highly diverse, concentrated in particular sectors and types of site and overwhelmingly focused upon established technologies with high rates of return. A major driver is the emergence of procurement frameworks for energy service contracts in the public sector. These act as intermediaries between clients and contractors, thereby lowering transaction costs and facilitating learning. The market is struggling to become established in commercial offices, largely as a result of split incentives, and is unlikely to develop further in this sector without different business models, tenancy arrangements and policy initiatives. Overall, the paper concludes that energy service contracts can play an important role in the transition to a low-carbon economy, especially when supported by intermediaries, but their potential is still limited by high transaction costs

Optimal Executive Compensation: Some Equivalence Results

This paper studies optimal managerial contracts in two contracting environments. When contracts can be based on earnings, an optimal contract is interpreted as a combination of base salary, golden parachute and bonus. When earnings are not verifiable, two types of optimal contracts are derived: a contract with restricted stock ownership, and a contract with stock options. These three types of optimal contracts are payoff-equivalent in a strong sense: agents' ex ante and ex post payoffs are the same under all three contracts, implying that the choice of contractual form is irrelevant in the environment studied in this paper. This paper thus suggests directions of research for the relevance of different contractual forms.Optimal contract, executive compensation, bonus, golden parachutes, stock ownership, stock options

EQUILIBRIUM PRINCIPAL-AGENT CONTRACTS Competition and R&D Incentives

We analyze competition between firms engaged in R&D activities in the choice of incentive contracts for managers with hidden productivities. The equilibrium screening contracts require extra effort/investment from the most productive managers compared to the first best contracts: under additional assumptions on the hazard rate of the distribution of types we obtain no- distortion in the middle rather than at the top. Moreover, the equilibrium contracts are characterized by effort differentials between (any) two types that are always increasing with the number of firms, suggesting a positive re- lation between competition and high-powered incentives. An inverted-U curve between competition and absolute investments can emerge for the most pro- ductive managers, especially when entry is endogenous. These results persist when contracts are not observable, when they include quantity precommit- ments, and when products are imperfect substitutes.Principal-agent contracts, asymmetric information, endogenous market structures

TreatJS: Higher-Order Contracts for JavaScript

TreatJS is a language embedded, higher-order contract system for JavaScript which enforces contracts by run-time monitoring. Beyond providing the standard abstractions for building higher-order contracts (base, function, and object contracts), TreatJS's novel contributions are its guarantee of non-interfering contract execution, its systematic approach to blame assignment, its support for contracts in the style of union and intersection types, and its notion of a parameterized contract scope, which is the building block for composable run-time generated contracts that generalize dependent function contracts. TreatJS is implemented as a library so that all aspects of a contract can be specified using the full JavaScript language. The library relies on JavaScript proxies to guarantee full interposition for contracts. It further exploits JavaScript's reflective features to run contracts in a sandbox environment, which guarantees that the execution of contract code does not modify the application state. No source code transformation or change in the JavaScript run-time system is required. The impact of contracts on execution speed is evaluated using the Google Octane benchmark.Comment: Technical Repor

Vertical Contracts between Airports and Airlines: is there a Trade-off between Welfare and Competitiveness?

Airports and airlines have been increasingly establishing vertical contracts, which have a wide variety of forms. These contracts have important implications for policy issues, namely for regulation and price discrimination legislation. In this paper we develop a model to analyse the effects of three types of vertical contracts, in what regards welfare, pro-competitiveness and the scope for regulation. We find that two types of contracts are anti-competitive, and that in all of them consumers are better-off, though in one of them within conditions regarding operational efficiency. We also conclude that regulation may (or may not) improve welfare depending on the type of contract and that price capping has different effects according to the facility the price of which is capped. Moreover, we find that these agreement’s effects exhibit a trade-off between pro-competitiveness and welfare and between price discrimination and welfare.vertical contracts, regulation, airports, airlines.