We present a Theory of Contracts under costly enforcement in the context of a dynamic relationship between an uninformed buyer and a seller who is privately informed on his persistent cost at the outset. Public enforcement relies on remedies for breach. Private enforcement comes from severing relationships. We first characterize aggregate enforcement constraints ensuring that trading partners d...

Behavioral software contracts supplement interface information with logical assertions. A rigorous enforcement of contracts provides useful feedback to developers if it signals contract violations as soon as they occur and if it assigns blame to violators with precise explanations. Correct blame assignment gets programmers started with the debugging process and can significantly decrease the ti...

In an e-service environment, contracts are important for attaining business process interoperability and enforcing their proper enactment. An e-contract is the computerized facilitation or automation of a contract in a crossorganizational business process. We find that e-contract enforcement can be divided into multiple layers and perspectives, which has not been adequately addressed in the lit...

We study how limited enforcement of contracts and barriers to business start-up affect the investment in knowledge capital and the adoption of new technologies. We show that barriers to business startup (limited competition) is the most important obstacle to growth. Limited enforceability of contracts is detrimental to growth only if there are barriers to business start-up. Our results are cons...

This paper presents an approach to describe, deploy and manage component-based applications having dynamic functional and non-functional requirements. The approach is centered on architectural descriptions and associated high-level contracts. Besides specifying non-functional (or QoS) requirements, these contracts are used to guide architecture customizations required to enforce the requirement...