The establishment and development of business-to-business relationships are commonly evaluated from the customers’ perspective. In this paper we look the process mainly from the opposite direction. We define the supplier’s partner selection process as continuous assessment of relationships with customers, rather than merely commencement needed during the early contract negotiation phase. We hav...

While there is a growing interest for componentbased systems in industry,little effort has so far been devoted to quality evaluation of these systems. This paper presents the definition of measures for two quality factors, namely robustness and “diagnosability” for the special case of OO systems for which thee approach known as Design by Contract has been used. The main steps in constructing th...

In classes developed using design-by-contract, contracts contain assertions that formalise preconditions, postconditions and invariants. To be sure that contracts are complete, they can be derived from specifications. For classes in a data structures library, equational specifications are appropriate. However, a conventional equational specification cannot usually be mapped directly to contract...

We develop a principal-agent model with a moral hazard problem in which the principal has access to a hard signal (the level of output) and a soft signal (the supervision signal) about the agent’s level of e¤ort. We show that the agent’s ability to manipulate the soft signal increases the cost of implementing the e¢ cient equilibrium, leading to wage compression when the in‡uence cost is privat...

Abstract. Although most of the predicted consequences of the internet-revolution in the 90s did not become reality, the internet has lead to sustainable changes in the organization of most industries. In particular, this is true for business-to-business (B2B) relations between firm. An obvious ‘proof’ for this is the rising number of socalled electronic markets—especially for B2B transactions—s...

This paper presents a model for coordinating negotiation processes in concurrent inter-organizational alliances. The IT system preserves the autonomy of organizations grouped in an alliance while enabling concurrency of their activities, flexibility of their negotiations and dynamic evolution of their environment. The purpose of this work is to offer support for small and medium enterprises whi...

This question received a powerful impetus with the publication of Stewart Macaulay’s pioneering study in 1963 into the use of contract law in the market place. Macaulay looked at the contracting practices of businesses in Wisconsin and found that many entered into agreements that didn’t satisfy the requirements of contract law and would not, therefore, be enforceable in the courts – and that th...

The goal of this paper is to investigate the issues connected with project team composition in enterprise system (ES) implementation. This exploratory study builds on research conducted among a few dozen enterprises introducing ES into their organisations. The paper analyses how the inquired companies organised an implementation team and a steering committee. The investigated issues include the...

Several studies of two-party negotiations have shown that negotiators more often than not reach inefficient compromises. We analyze the circumstances under which rational agents make inefficient compromises and refrain from improving them. We do this by describing and interpreting various negotiation situations and by developing formal constructs and theorems for determining the character of a ...

Recently many philosophers and social choice theorists have questioned traditional welfare egalitarianism by introducing a notion of responsibility. They propose to distinguish between two sets of individual characteristics: those for which individuals are to be kept responsible and those for which they can be compensated. This approach raises the related questions of where to draw the line bet...