In this paper we study the effects that loss contracts—prepayments can be clawed back later—have on group coordination when there is strategic uncertainty. To do so, investigate choices made by experimental subjects in a minimum effort game. control sessions, incentives are formulated as classic gain contract, while treatment framed an isomorphic contract. Contrary to most results contract lite...

A strong research emphasis is being given towards regulating interoperable multi-agent environments through norms and institutions. We are concerned with environments in which agents form together virtual organizations leading to cooperation agreements that can be enforced. An electronic institution provides a coordination framework facilitating automatic contract establishment and providing an...

This paper considers a two stages pharmaceutical supply chain (PSC) consisting of a pharmaceutical manufacturer (pharma-manufacturer) that supplies one type of pharmaceutical product to a pharma-retailer. The customer demand rate for the pharmaceutical product is dependent on the pharma-retailer’s current-inventory level. The pharma-retailer determines the order quantity ( ) value as decision v...

Coordination is essential in distributed computing, which involves a group of loosely coupled agents cooperating in order to solve problems in a decentralised fashion. One of the popular approaches of coordination is the generative tuple space based communication, where agents interact via a shared data space. This paper discusses the implementation of Contract Net protocol (CNP) in a number of...

Many applications require teams of robots to cooperatively execute tasks. Among these domains are those in which successful coordination must respect intra-path constraints, which are constraints that occur on the paths of agents and affect route planning. This work focuses on multi-agent coordination for disaster response with intra-path precedence constraints, a compelling application that is...

The literature and practice of negotiation and auctions, especially in the burgeoning area of electronic commerce, demonstrate that there is a wide and rapidly growing variety of negotiation and auction processes both in use and proposed. We believe that in the future automated online auctions will become a fundamental building block for contract negotiation carried out electronically. To avoid...

This paper deals with the coordination of supply chain composed of a leading supplier and one retailer as a follower under asymmetric demand information. The demand information asymmetry is portrayed by the state of demand forecast information, accordingly the model, the state of demand information is the special discrete distribution, is established. The parameters menus, which are the optimal...

| Tools for selective proactive as well as reactive information retrieval, information extraction , information organization and assimilation , knowledge discovery using heterogeneous, distributed knowledge and data sources constitute some of the key enabling technologies for managing the data overload and translating recent advances in automated data acquisition, digital storage, computers and...