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Blockchain-based distributed computing platforms enable the trusted execution of computation—defined in the form of smart contracts—without trusted agents. Smart contracts are envisioned to have a variety of applications, ranging from financial to IoT asset tracking. Unfortunately, the development of smart contracts has proven to be extremely error prone. In practice, contracts are riddled with...

The capability to reallocate items|e.g. tasks, securities, bandwidth slices, Mega Watt hours of electricity, and collectibles|is a key feature in automated negotiation. Especially when agents have preferences over combinations of items, this is highly nontrivial. Marginal cost based reallocation leads to an anytime algorithm where every agent's payo increases monotonically over time. Di erent c...

buy-back contracts in the upstream oil and gas projects of iran, has experienced the third generation of this kind of contracts since its inception on 1373 (1994) when the oil and gas industry of iran opend its petroleum market to the foreign investment. these contracts have since been subject to the various critieques raised by international oil companies, foreign investors, or petroleum exper...

the analyze of petroleum contracts demonstrate that in respect to the intensity of the cooperation between the state company and oil companies, we could find the different evaluative categories of the contracts on upstream oil industry.historically, the first generation of the petroleum contracts was the concession agreement in which the transferring of ownership was the base. the license agree...

time sharing contracts are a new type of contracts relating to immovable property created in response to modern life necessities. the main feature of this type of contract is that the ownership of property is transferred to the buyer for a limited period of the year. unlike traditional sale contracts in which the buyer acquires the complete and continuous ownership of the property purchased, in...

Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent to which finite contracts can approximate the idealized complete contracts. The objectives of the ...

This article examines the development of profitor revenue-sharing contracts in the motion picture industry. Contrary to much popular belief, such contracts have been in use since the start of the studio era. However, early contracts differed from those seen today. The evolution of the current contract is traced, and evidence regarding the increased use of sharing contracts after 1948 is examine...

We propose a simple event calculus representation of contracts and a reactive belief-desire-intention agent architecture to enable the monitoring and execution of contract terms and conditions. We use the event calculus to deduce current and past obligations, obligation fulfilment and violation. By associating meta-information with the contracts, the agent is able to select which of its contrac...