Relatedness of Decisions in Business Services Outsourcing

The Service Industries Journal (2010) Vol. 30(13) pp, 2225–2237

Posted: 2 Apr 2012

See all articles by Fernando Merino

Fernando Merino

University of Murcia - Department of Applied Economics

Diego Rodríguez

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: August 5, 2009

Abstract

The literature of service outsourcing is mainly focused on case studies or specific service activities. However, there is no evidence about the pattern of relatedness among outsourcing of services. This paper analyses this issue by a relatedness index previously applied in the framework of product and technological diversification. The index is applied to analyse the degree of relatedness for outsourcing decisions among an array of fourteen services in a large data set of Spanish manufacturers in 1990–2006, detecting four time-constant clusters. An econometric analysis tests the alternative explanations about this pattern of joint decisions, based on shared knowledge and on workers' expertise.

Keywords: outsourcing, relatedness, business services

JEL Classification: L24, D23, M21

Suggested Citation

Merino, Fernando and Rodríguez, Diego Rodríguez, Relatedness of Decisions in Business Services Outsourcing (August 5, 2009). The Service Industries Journal (2010) Vol. 30(13) pp, 2225–2237, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2031466

Fernando Merino (Contact Author)

University of Murcia - Department of Applied Economics ( email )

Campus Espinardo
30100 Murcia
Spain

Diego Rodríguez Rodríguez

affiliation not provided to SSRN ( email )

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