Orchestrating Web services has become the method of choice for building new services on top of existing ones. One area of interest for this technology is business processes. Languages and methods have been developed and are now getting widely used, BPEL being the typical instance. When exposing the profile of a Web service, Quality of Service (QoS) must be specified. Besides security aspects, Q...

We report the results of experiments designed to test recent theories of vertical foreclosure. Consistent with the theory, vertical integration improves the upstream firm’s ability to commit to restricting output to the monopoly level, as does the use of public contracts. Public contracts are not a perfect substitute for vertical integration, however: integration allows more surplus to be extra...

Increasingly, governments are using contracts as a means of achieving accountability for public resources directed towards community organisations. This paper compares contractual arrangements between community organisations and governments in British Columbia, Queeensland, and New Zealand. The paper examines the extent to which these contracts are able to measure performance. These contracts a...

In the context of Service Oriented Computing behavioural contracts are descriptions of the observable message-passing behaviour of services. In other terms, contracts are behavioural interfaces that can be used, for instance, to check whether a group of services can be safely combined avoiding, e.g., undesired deadlocks. In this paper we consider the problem of discovering available services th...

Despite the potential of Design-by-Contract (DbC) for increasing the reliability and robustness of software, it has to date experienced only limited use. One reason for this, is that each DbC solution targets a single language (or language run-time) and thus employs different syntax and implementations for specifying contracts for each. Given that modern applications increasingly employ multipl...

This paper contributes to the supply chain contracts literature in economics and operations by performing qualitative sensitivity analysis of a wholesale price contract in a two-echelon supply chain setting. Ordertheory tools are used to derive sufficient conditions for monotonicity of contract parameters. The upstream supplier is modeled as a Stackelberg leader. The supplier is assumed to have...

Abstract. Service aggregation is one of the main issues in the emerging area of service-oriented computing. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the long-term objective of lifting service aggregation from manual hand-crafting to a semi-automated engineered process. We present a methodology which, given a set of service contracts, tries to construct an aggregation of such services. Service ...

In the context of Service Oriented Computing behavioural contracts are descriptions of the observable message-passing behavior of services. In other terms, contracts are behavioural interfaces that can be used, for instance, to check whether a group of services can be safely combined avoiding, e.g., undesired deadlocks. In this paper we consider the problem of discovering available services tha...

Using data on mobile phone handset sales from a single retail store, we examine the impact of different retail responsibility designations and vertical contracts on seller service provision, firm profitability, and social welfare. During our sample, this store switched from retailer-managed retailing with linear pricing contracts to manufacturermanaged retailing with revenue sharing. We estimat...

This paper proposes a novel agent-design for a three-player game involving human players and computer agents. The game is analogous to settings in which participants repeatedly negotiate over contracts, such as cell-phones and credit card plans. The game comprises three players, two service providers who compete to sign contracts with a single customer player. The service providers compete to m...