Regulating Agent Involvement in Inter-Enterprise Electronic Commerce

Current research on electronic-commerce focused mainly on fair and e cient transfer of money and goods between a client and a vendor. Inter-enterprise electronic commerce, though, bestows a more complex setting on the trade by adding a new dimension to the individual-merchant frame. The parties involved in a purchase are no longer autonomous entities, but are members of an organization whose rules of doing business they have to obey. We propose a exible approach towards regulating agent involvement in interenterprise electronic commerce. The method is based on the concept of law-governed interaction (LGI) which makes a strict separation between a declarative, formal statement of a policy and its enforcement.