A contract where the agent is compensated ex post only upon satisfactory performance, often called a no-cureno-pay contract, can arise as under several circumstances. In this paper, we model the problem of contractual choice as a principal-agent contract which is modified due to hidden information about the competence of the agent to fulfill the obligations of the contract. The agent offers a c...

Up until the 1990's, software quality was determined mostly by its functionality. But market competition and contractual obligations have forced today's software suppliers to enlarge their notion of quality beyond functionality, and to include such factors as user support, product evolution and quality of implementation. There are some up-front costs to adding quality to a software product that...

Current mechanisms for distributed access management are limited in their capabilities to provide federated information sharing while ensuring adequate levels of resource protection. This work presents a policy-based framework designed to address these limitations for access management in federated systems. In particular, it supports: (i) decentralized administration while preserving local auto...

Recent years, offshore outsourcing has received large amount of attention from both industry and academia because of its attractive advantages such as cost reduction, talent access. As an alternative way to implement information systems in operation management, offshore insourcing has been greatly overlooked. Though organizations shun from the contractual obligations in offshore insourcing, the...

For individuals to enter mutually beneficial exchange relationships they have to recognise them as such and they have to be able to commit to fulfil their contractual obligations. The ways in which a society's institutions mitigate this fundamental problem of exchange' determine its efficiency and distribution. This article calls attention to the need, ability, and promise of studying the histo...

Received: 11 November 2005 Revised: 1 February 2006 Accepted: 20 February 2006 Abstract Mobile user switching has become a critical issue facing mobile service providers. This study examines the switching behavior of mobile users who are not under any contractual obligations to stay with a provider. Drawing upon the literature on relationship marketing and switching costs, we examine if the rel...

While various liability rules of tort law provide efficient incentives to invest, breach remedies of contract law are claimed to be distortive. Since, at least in Germany, obligations law provides general rules for both contractual and tort relationships such discrepancy seems puzzling. The paper identifies a saddle point property as the driving force behind most efficiency results and it estab...

We investigate the problem of locally monitoring contract regulated behaviours in agentbased web services. We encode contract clauses in service specifications by using extended timed automata. We propose a non intrusive local monitoring framework along with an API to monitor the fulfillment (or violation) of contractual obligations. A key feature of the framework is that it is fully symbolic t...

Fidelity is the most fundamental ethical principle regulating the medical profession, and it requires medical professionals (MPs) to put their patients’ interests ahead of all others, including their own. The MPs who contracted and/or died of severe acute respiratory syndrome in the 2003 epidemic clearly illustrated both the glory and cost of living with this principle. Yet, if we look at the f...