Efficiency under contractual incompleteness often requires voluntary cooperation in situations where self-regarding incentives for contractual compliance are present as well. Here we provide a comprehensive experimental analysis based on the gift-exchange game of how explicit and implicit incentives affect cooperation. We first show that there is substantial cooperation under non-incentive comp...

In this paper, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for QoS management based on soft probabilistic contracts. The authors approach also encompasses general QoS parameters, with “response time” as a particular case. In addition, the authors support composite QoS parameters, for example, combining timing aspects with “quality of data” or security level. They also study contract compositi...

Agent-based normative systems offer the potential for a business to model, understand the consequences of, and then refine contracts to improve the outcomes for that business. In this paper, we combine a simulation technique designed for investigating and tuning emergent behavior in multi-agent systems with an approach to modeling norms of the complexity found in business contracts. We believe ...

Web services orchestrations and choreographies require establishing Quality of Service (QoS) contracts with the user. This is achieved by performing QoS composition, based on contracts established between the orchestration and the called Web services. Typical QoS parameters include maximum query throughput, response time, security, and validity of the response. Usually, QoS contracts are stated...

Simulink is a popular tool for model-based development of control systems. However, due to the complexity caused by the increasing demand for sophisticated controllers, validation of Simulink models is becoming a more difficult task. To ensure correctness and reliability of large models, it is important to be able to reason about model parts and their interactions. This paper provides a definit...

The contractual approach turns out to be well-suited to specification and verification needs in component-based software systems. However, contracts are frequently challenged by dynamic re-configurations and fluctuations of non functional aspects. To solve this problem, we propose, in this article, a first negotiation model which aims at automatically restoring the validity of contracts. We als...

As technology infrastructure becomes available for electronic exchange of contracts, the IT community is becoming more interested in modeling of contracts as governance structures for inter-organisational interactions and business processes. This paper investigates e-contract modeling and monitoring. Subsquently, we propose a contract layered model that allows for the convenient monitoring of m...

Work to date on negotiation protocols has focused on defining contracts consisting of one or a few independent issues. Many real-world contracts, by contrast, are much more complex, consisting of multiple inter-dependent issues and intractably large contract spaces. This paper describes a simulated annealing based approach appropriate for negotiating such complex contracts that achieves near-op...

In this paper, the authors develop a comprehensive framework for QoS management based on soft probabilistic contracts. The authors approach also encompasses general QoS parameters, with “response time” as a particular case. In addition, the authors support composite QoS parameters, for example, combining timing aspects with “quality of data” or security level. They also study contract compositi...

Background: ART contracts involving third parties have been created while clinical reproductive treatments are globally widespread. Iran is pioneer in applying these treatments in middle-east due to shii’at jurisprudence prescribing them. This key role in region, has raised Iranian jurists’ responsibility in developing a legal system regarding administration of ART. The most significant part of...