With the explosive growth of internet activity, there will be an increasing reliance on intelligent software agents for electronic commerce and information retrieval. Such multi-agents systems will be comprised of self-motivated agents that interact with each other though negotiation and task delegation. Multi-agent technology models and facilitates these interactions through automated contract...

Due to the domain characteristics of business ethics, a contractarian theory for business ethics will need to be essentially different from the contract model as it is applied to other domains. Much of the current criticism of contractarian business ethics (CBE) can be traced back to autonomy, one of its three boundary conditions. After explaining why autonomy is so important, this article cons...

It has long been standard in agency theory to search for incentivecompatible mechanisms on the assumption that people care only about their own material wealth. However, this assumption is clearly refuted by numerous experiments, and we feel that it may be useful to consider nonpecuniary utility in mechanism design and contract theory. Accordingly, we devise an experiment to explore optimal con...

The concept of “contract” has similar but not identical interpretations for lawyers and economists. Both Economic and Legal theories distinguish transactions from contracts based on the possibility to rely on court enforcement. Formal and informal promises are enforceable by courts, however there is not a clear distinction between a contract and an agreement since agents do not know a priori th...

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...

ISO 26262 ”Road vehicles-Functional Safety” is a standard for the automotive industry, administered in an attempt to prevent potential accidents due to systematic and random failures in the Electrical/Electronic-system. ISO 26262 is based on the principle of relying on safety requirements as the main source of information to enforce correctness of design. We show that the contract theory from t...

Multiuser cooperative communication significantly improves the performance of wireless communication networks. One key challenge of multiuser cooperative communication is how to design a cooperative mechanism to incentivize potential relay nodes to help a source node in its data transmission. In this paper, to address this problem, we apply a contract-based principal-agent framework to a cognit...

We discuss an incentivizing market and model-based approach to design the energy management and control systems which realize high-quality ancillary services in dynamic power grids. Under the electricity liberalization, such incentivizing market should secure a high speed market-clearing by using the market players’ private information well. Inspired by contract theory in microeconomics field, ...

This article deals with IT outsourcing contracts. Contract amendments are often necessary, either because of changing client needs, or because the contracts themselves are incomplete. In some cases, requests for changes give rise to disputes and even litigation. Also market conformity is a hot topic for IT outsourcing contracts. Dissatisfied clients may wish to repatriate the service as a resul...