We investigate how explicit performance incentives in incomplete employment contracts interact with agents’ voluntary cooperation in one-shot and repeated gift-exchange experiments. If contracts are incentive compatible, agents choose their best-reply effort and there is no voluntary cooperation. By contrast, there is substantial voluntary cooperation if the contract is not incentive compatible...

The research in this paper is focused on enhancing existing knowledge in cost estimation models at the bidding stage of service support contracts. The difficulty of this task lies in the long lasting contracts, which in some cases may reach even 40 years. The paper first reports the existing knowledge through detailed review of literature. The paper studies different service support contracts a...

This paper presents an approach for the specification and implementation of business contracts needed for Business-to-Business (B2B) services. We first examine typical elements of business contracts and their usage. This analysis sets a foundation for 1) modeling contracts and 2) developing a role-based architecture that supports typical operations in the contract’s lifetime. We explore how con...

the protection of creditors and making suitable security for their rights will result in their trust for the investment and will lead to the briskness of the trade and economic growth. one of the most important problems is the protection of creditors against contracts that debtors conclude them with the intention of escape from the payment of their debts. in this study the validity of these con...

Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts are serially executed by miners before appending them to the blockchain. Later, those contracts are serially re-executed by validators to verify that the sma...

This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the t...

Social commitments are developed for multi-agent systems according to the current practice in law regarding contract formation and breach. Deafeasible commitments are used to provide a useful link between multi-agent systems and legal doctrines. The proposed model makes the commitments more expressive relative to contract law, improving the model for the life cycle of the commitments. As a cons...

Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent that finite contracts can approximate the idealized complete contracts. The objectives of the pape...

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...