Service contracts are common practice in some industries while being eliminated others. To investigate this phenomenon, we identify expectation–reality discrepancy (ERD) as a key determinant. A provider's ERD is defined consumers’ ex-ante expected valuation minus their ex-post realized of the service. Our analysis reveals that providers’ contract strategies critically depend on ERDs rather than...

Today, the number of functional equivalent web services increases rapidly. Service search engines and marketplaces are opening up to guide users to their preferred service providers. The question of what is the best service for the user’s demand cannot be answered sufficiently. While semantic matchmaking techniques attempt to solve this question mainly for functional aspects, it is also importa...

We define a formal contract language along with subcontract and compliance relations. We then extrapolate contracts out of processes, that are a recursion-free fragment of ccs. We finally demonstrate that a client completes its interactions with a service provided the corresponding contracts comply. Our contract language may be used as a foundation of Web services technologies, such as wsdl and...

In the context of Service Oriented Computing, contracts are descriptions of the externally observable behaviour of services. Given a group of collaborating services, their contracts can be used to verify whether their composition is sound, i.e., the services are compliant. In this paper, we relate the theory of contracts with the notion of choreography conformance, used to check whether an aggr...

We compare the welfare effects of different regulation schemes of electricity distribution utilities. The compared regulation schemes are fixed price regulation, cost of service regulation, menu of cost-contingent contracts and simple menus of contracts. In our calculations we utilize the information of firm specific potential to improve cost efficiency. The firm specific cost information of Fi...