Most individuals strive to satisfy every obligation laid out in standard form contracts such as mortgages, insurance plans, or credit agreements. Sophisticated parties, however, adapt and modify their obligations during contract performance by negotiating for lenient treatment taking advantage of unclear terms. The common law explicitly authorizes variance from standardized terms performance. W...

In this paper, we present work in progress on the Electronic Contract Framework, an agent-based framework for the automation of contractual relationships. Electronic contracts are the cornerstone of this framework and contractual agents manipulate these abstractions to specify business relationships and to automate their execution. We first define the concepts and the formalism used to model el...

Our purpose in this paper is to provide an overview of what we know about alliance contracts. After a short introduction to the contents of alliance contracts, we start by contrasting alliance contractual form and governance form. Next, we focus on two related constructs: contractual complexity and contractual completeness. We suggest that contractual complexity is a more adequate construct to ...

Online purchase and delivery of goods and services requires an electronic contracting process. Formalization of contractual content enables automatic delivery of services and monitoring of the terms and conditions of the contract at service runtime. The Simple Obligation and Right Model (SORM) provides an abstract, domain-independent model of contractual content. Model instances can be interpre...

Problems of developing specialized financial services for housing are acute in transition socialist economies (TSE). Some constraints derive from the incomplete and imperfect privatization of the real estate sector. Others reflect the fragmented and undeveloped financial system. This paper examines a financial instrument, contractual savings for housing (CSH), that is often advocated as a major...