The ISA is the established hardware-software contract. As the ISA hides hardware features that affect timing of execution, it is no longer sufficient for ensuring system security and safety. We argue that a new contract is required, which exposes such features.

Knowledge workers are gradually becoming the most valuable and productive part of employees, but their intrinsic characters lead to their high turnover rate. As viewed from the theory of psychological contract, this article analyzes the flow process of knowledge workers, establishes the employee satisfaction model and finds out that one important reason inducing knowledge workers’ high turnover...

Electronic contracting is an essential service to develop electronic commerce. But this service is not very used because merchants and consumers do not trust in contracting by electronic means. For time we already have technical solutions that should allow to give trust to the actors implied in this new scenario. But the lack of international standards and of an appropriate juridical mark, supp...

This paper studies commitment strategies in three-player negotiation settings comprising human players and computer agents. We defined a new game called the Contract Game which is analogous to real-world market settings in which participants need to reach agreement over contracts in order to succeed. The game comprises three players, two service providers and one customer. The service providers...

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...

Purpose: This paper explores whether the concept of psychological contracts underpinned by relational/transactional exchanges provides an adequate description of knowledge workers’ contracts. Methodology: The research approach uses interviews with 10 scientists from within a pre-eminent Australian scientific research and development organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Researc...

The increasing complexity of products and services encourages more and more companies to form collaborative networks. As these companies are independent organizations there is often an issue of governance. We suggest a possible architecture for such a business network that proposes a contract as the principal means of coordination and describes how such a contract can be designed and enacted.

We consider how much influence a center can exert on a game if its only power is to propose contracts to the agents before the original game, and enforce the contracts after the game if all agents sign it. Modelling the situation as an extensiveform game, we note that the outcomes that are enforceable are precisely those in which the payoff to each agent is higher than its payoff in at least on...

Many possible solutions, differing in the assumptions and implementations of the components in use, are usually in competition during early design stages. Deciding which solution to adopt requires considering several trade-offs. Model checking represents a possible way of comparing such designs, however, when the number of designs is large, building and validating so many models may be intracta...

This study examines the influence of customer service policies on consumer purchase intentions in business-to-consumer (B2C) electronic commerce. Prior research findings proposed that practitioners could utilize these policies to influence their customers’ purchase intentions. Based on the psychological contract theory, this study conducted an experiment to examine whether customer service poli...