This article develops the point that incentive and risk-bearing problems associated with contractual holdup may justify legal intervention. Contractual holdup is considered both for fresh contracts and for modifications of contracts. One type of legal intervention is flat voiding of contracts. Such intervention tends to be advantageous when holdup situations are engineered. Another type of inte...

This chapter seeks to evaluate the dominant IT outsourcing contracts model (pay-later) as compared to an alternative model (pay-now) in light of changing economic conditions. We integrate practitioner observations in the spirit of mathematical transaction cost problems to develop a conceptual economic model to compare these two types of contracts. We uncover three very important facts which sug...

We present CO2 , a parametric calculus for contract-based computing in distributed systems. By abstracting from the actual contract language, our calculus generalises both the contracts-as-processes and contracts-as-formulae paradigms. The calculus features primitives for advertising contracts, for reaching agreements, and for querying the fulfilment of contracts. Coordination among participant...