用交易成本经济学解释会计外包外文翻译.docVIP

外文翻译 Using Transaction Cost Economics to explain outsourcing of accounting Material Source: Author:Patricia, Gerrit Outsourcing can be defined as the act of subcontracting out all or parts of some function in a firm to an external party. The transaction cost theory of the firm (TCE), introduced by Coase (1937), has become a standard framework to explain why some firms choose to organize a given function internally, while other firms decide to outsource that function to an external party. An extensive part of the empirical research on outsourcing adopts this TCE framework (Boerne and Marcher 2002). By considering the relative cost of transactions using its own employees on the one hand and external parties on the other, TCE tries to explain how companies are organized. Simply stated by Klein (2005), transactions differ in the degree to which relationship-specific assets are involved (asset specificity), the amount of uncertainty about the future (environmental uncertainty), the amount of uncertainty about other parties’ actions (behavior uncertainty), and the frequency with which a given transaction occurs. Many empirical studies have investigated the outsourcing of production tasks (so-called backward integration) and found that asset specificity is a significant driver in the outsourcing decision, both when studied within a single industry and in cross-sectional studies (e.g., John and Weitz 1988; Masten et al. 1989; Monteverde and Teece 1982). Anderson and Gatignon (2005) discuss several studies wherein the TCE framework is used to explain outsourcing of marketing and distribution tasks (so-called forward integration). Both asset specificity (human capital) and behavioral uncertainty seemed significant in explaining entry mode (independent agent versus sales employees). With respect to the outsourcing of other service functions, such as human resources, IT, and accounting, only a few studies are available. For instance, Watjatrakul (2005) and Barthelemy and