Consider a society in which the production and enforcement of law is entirely private. Individuals contract with rights enforcement firms to protect their rights and arrange for the settlement of legal disputes to which they are a party. Each pair of enforcement firms contracts with an arbitration agency, a private court, to settle disputes between their customers, agreeing to accept and enforc...

s This paper reports laboratory experiments comparing arbitration behavior between and across two developed countries with extensive trade relations, the United States and Japan. Besides comparing domestic disputes in both locations, we evaluate disputes between the two countries. While we find nominal differences between the US and Japan, we observe significant changes in both cultures when fa...

Leveraging a longitudinal data set concerning 102 interfirm disputes, we evaluate the effects of contract structure on trust and on the likelihood of continued collaboration. We theoretically refine and empirically extend prior research by (1) distinguishing between the control and coordination functions of contracts, (2) separating goodwillbased and competence-based trust, and (3) evaluating t...

The ability to support disputes is an important, but often neglected aspect of payment systems. In this paper, we present a language for expressing dispute claims in a uniied manner, independent of any spe-ciic payment system. We illustrate how to support claims made in this language with evidence tokens from an example payment system. We also describe an architecture for dispute handling. Our ...

In case of micropayment schemes, all costs that appear during functioning should be minimized. This includes cost of disputes and charge backs that result in penalties for the vendor. We extend the PayWord micropayment scheme with payment approval to minimize disputes, charge backs or to avoid attacks that ruin the reputation of the vendor. Payment approval is achieved by employing a MAC functi...