Ex ante contractual agreements between parties must necessarily be enforced by an enforcing authority ex post. If the enforcing authority turns out to be opportunistic, the initial contract de...nes an ex post rent dissipation game that the contracting parties will play in trying to bribe him. When parties foresee this possibility, they may rationally refrain from contracting in the ...rst plac...

The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight for the research community and practitioners the various aspects of using VMI-type supply chains in today’s business environment as well as a number of directions for future studies. In this regard, fifty articles published in major international journals, beginning in 1995, which contribute to the VMI-type supply chains are reviewed via a syste...

This paper presents a methodology for deriving business process descriptions based on terms in business contract. The aim is to assist process modellers in structuring collaborative interactions between parties, including their internal processes, to ensure contract-compliant behaviour. The methodology requires a formal model of contracts to facilitate process derivations and to form a basis fo...

We propose a computational paradigm for service-oriented applications, where the interactions among services are driven by contracts. A contract is a commitment between two or more parties, which specifies the duties and the rights of the parties involved therein. We study the logical foundations of contracts, through an intuitionistic logic extended with a “contractual” form of implication. Th...

Electronic contracting, based on explicit representation of different parties’ commitments, is a promising way to specifying and regulating behaviour in distributed business applications. A key part of contract-based system is a process through which the actual behaviour of individual parties is checked for conformance with contracts set to govern such behaviour. Such checking requires that rel...