Discretionary Enforcement of Electronic Contracts

As in traditional commerce, parties to a contract in ebusiness environments are expected to operate in good faith and comply with mutually agreed terms of contract. It may be the case however that deviation from the agreed contract obligations occur either intentionally or due to force majeure. In this paper we argue that there is value in providing various levels of automated support to deal with contract non-compliance in e-marketplaces in order to reach the best overall outcome for all parties. This includes monitoring contract significant events, simple notifications to the parties about non-compliance events and a range of enforcement mechanisms. These mechanisms can be either nondiscretionary (as in preventive security mechanisms) or discretionary, which rely on a number of control mechanisms that are applied when contract rules are violated. We describe a number of such control mechanisms and how they can be used to extend capabilities of a contract management architecture previously developed.