Formalizing the ontological commitment of a logical language means offering a way to specify the intended meaning of its vocabulary by constraining the set of its models, giving explicit information about the intended nature of the modelling primitives and their a priori relationships. We present here a formal definition of ontological commitment which aims to capture the very basic ontological...

We study the two-party commitment problem, where two players have secret values they wish to commit to each other. Traditional commitment schemes cannot be used here because they do not guarantee independence of the committed values. We present three increasingly strong definitions of independence in this setting and give practical protocols for each. Our work is related to work in non-malleabl...

Existing computer science approaches to business modeling offer lowlevel abstractions such as data and control flows, which fail to capture the business intent underlying the interactions that are central to real-life business models. In contrast, existing management science approaches are high-level but not only are these semiformal, they are also focused exclusively on managerial concerns suc...

In this paper, we address the issue of the specification and verification of commitment protocols having a social semantics. We begin with developing a new language to formally specify these protocols and desirable properties by enhancing CTL∗ logic with modalities of commitments and actions on these commitments. We also present a symbolic model checking algorithm for commitments and their acti...

Beside strict linguistic commitments of models to metamodels, documents to schemata, programs to grammars and activities to protocols, we often require or crave more flexible commitments. Some of such types of flexible commitments are well-understood and even formalised, others are considered harmful. In this paper, we make an attempt to classify these types from the language theory point of vi...

The success of contract-based multiagent systems relies on agents complying with their commitments. When something goes wrong, it is important to understand what are the commitments’ mutual relations as well as their individual states. Accordingly, we explore how commitments are related through the three-agent commitment delegation operation. We then propose exception monitoring based on such r...

Commitments play a central role in multi-agent coordination. However, they are inherently uncertain and it is important to take these uncertainties into account during planning and scheduling. This paper addresses the problem of handling the uncertainty in commitments. We propose a new model of commitment that incorporates the uncertainty, the use of contingency analysis to reduce the uncertain...

Computationally binding and perfectly hiding commitments can be constructed from GM-secure public-key encryptions. The main idea is to send an encryption of the message together with the public key. To decommit, we reveal the random bits used to encrypt the message. In fact, one-way functions suffice to construct computationally binding and perfectly hiding commitments. Perfectly binding and co...

We study a simple bargaining mechanism in which, given an order of players, the first n− 1 players sequentially announce their reservation price. Once these prices are given, the last player may choose a coalition to cooperate with, and pay each member of this coalition his reservation price. The only expected final equilibrium payoff is a new solution concept, the “selective value”, which can ...