Permissions in Contracts, a Logical Insight

Despite the fact that contracts are, by definition, an agreement between two or more parties, most formal studies limit themselves to contracts regulating only a single party or the parties independently of each other, without looking into how permissions, obligations or prohibitions of one party affect the other. This article deals with the analysis of what different types of permissions mean in the context of contracts. To give formal semantics we use an automata based formalism allowing to model for one party agreeing, delaying or plain refusing on performing certain actions that the other is attempting. This approach also yields a natural notion of contract strictness analysis for each party.