Since the mid-1990s, dozens of States, including those of the EU, have reformed their evidence laws so as to grant digital signature technologies the same proof value as handwritten signatures, as a mechanism for proving identity of authorship, consentement to obligations, and integrity of electronic records after their transmission across time and space. Yet, several archival institutions (inc...

Building complex software systems necessitates the use of component-based architectures. In theory, of the set of components needed for a design, only some small portion of them are “custom”; the rest are reused or refactored existing pieces of software. Unfortunately, this is an idealized situation. Just because two components should work together does not mean that they will work together. Th...

Obligation is displayed toward rules or requirements of formalized roles stemming from membership in society, whereas loyalty is shown to persons and is founded upon communal commitment to them. Loyalties entail obligations, but the converse does not necessarily hold. While one may have obligations toward everyone, it is neither conceptually nor psychologically possible to be loyal to all perso...

Several regulatory authorities worldwide have imposed forward contract obligations on electricity producers as a way to mitigate their market power. In order to understand the e¤ects of such contractual obligations, we introduce forward contracting in a uniform-price auction model with complete information and discrete bids. The model predicts that forward contracts are generally pro-competitiv...

This paper critiques blockchain-based “smart contracts,” which aim to automatically and securely execute obligations without reliance on a centralized enforcement authority. Though smart contracts do have some features that might serve the goals of social justice and fairness, I suggest that they are based on a thin conception of what law does, and how it does it. Smart contracts focus on the t...

We present a high-level enterprise system architecture that closely models the domain ontology of resource and information flows in enterprises. It is: Process-oriented: formal, user-definable specifications for the expected exchange of resources (money, goods, and services), notably contracts, are represented explicitly in the system state to reflect expectations on future events; Event-driven...

Infrastructure concessions are frequently renegotiated after investments are sunk, resulting in better contractual terms for the franchise holders. This paper offers a political economy explanation for renegotiations that occur with no apparent holdup. We argue that they are used by political incumbents to anticipate infrastructure spending and thereby increase the probability of winning an upc...

Today, the number of functional equivalent web services increases rapidly. Service search engines and marketplaces are opening up to guide users to their preferred service providers. The question of what is the best service for the user’s demand cannot be answered sufficiently. While semantic matchmaking techniques attempt to solve this question mainly for functional aspects, it is also importa...

Information security operations ― necessary to protect the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of an organization’s information systems against attacks ― represent substantial investments in technologies, tools, and human resources. Typically, the relationship between the supplier of an information system and its users is regulated by a Service Level Agreement, and the supplier must de...

In network organisations and electronic commerce control mechanisms to guarantee inter-organisational contract compliance are important tools to enhance trust in a fair business transaction. We propose the e-value/control design methodology for designing controls for network organisations. The e-value/control design methodology is an extension of the e-value design methodology for business mode...