Call Center Outsourcing Contracts Under Information Asymmetry

Sameer Hasija, Edieal J. Pinker, Robert A. Shumsky
2008 Management science  
In this paper we examine contracts to coordinate the capacity decision of a vendor who has been hired by a client to provide call center support. We consider a variety of contracts, all based on our observations of contracts used by one large vendor. We examine the role of different contract features such as pay-per-time, pay-per-call, service level agreements, and constraints on service rates and abandonment. We show how different combinations of these contract features enable client firms to
more » ... etter manage vendors when there is information asymmetry about worker productivity. In particular we focus on how different contracts can coordinate by yielding the system-optimal capacity decision by the vendor and consider how profits are allocated between the client and the vendor.
doi:10.1287/mnsc.1070.0804 fatcat:eqkjqxefvff4bexug2z5aqzi7e