Research on Cost Allocation for Inter Organizational Systems

摘要

Inter organizational systems (IOS) play an increasing role in information exchange and resource sharing across organizational boundaries. But designing and implementing of IOS needs extraordinary specific capital investment that should be fairly allocated among cooperative members. Although numerous researches have been conducted on IOS from interdisciplinary areas, unfortunately seldom has been done on cost analysis of IOS. This paper shifts attention to cost allocation for IOS which is a critical part of guaranteeing efficient cooperation. First, this paper analyzes the content of cost for IOS, then based on various considerations, proposes the Stackelberg game model to analyze the cost allocation mechanism between a core firm and its partners. Results show that when member's return on IOS increases, the cost proportion increases as well. In addition, when the risk of IOS is up within a certain range, the proportion of cost for partners rises while it decreases for the core firm. These results are consistent with the later simulation.