Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every possible interaction between compatible clients and servers will complete successfully. It is generally agreed that real applications often require the abil...

Uncertainty is an inherent property of open, distributed and multi-party systems. The economic viability of mutually beneficial relationships between the constituent parties in these systems relies on the ability of each party to effectively quantify and reason over uncertainty in order to facilitate rational decision-making. Service provision in Grid systems is one such relationship, in which ...

A large body of theoretical work has explored the channels through which vertical contracts can induce efficiency improvements. However, it is also important to study vertical contracts empirically in order to gain insight into the relative size of different types of efficiency gains. In this paper, I empirically analyse a contractual innovation in the vertically separated video rental industry...

We consider a market with two suppliers and a set of buyers in search of procurement contracts with one of the suppliers. In particular, each buyer needs to process a certain volume of work, and each supplier’s ability to process the customers’ requests is constrained by a production capacity. The procurement contracts include guarantees that the products will be available when needed, and the ...

Software development based on the composition of black-box software like Web Services and Software Components is impeded by incompatibilities in their interfaces. Software adaptation has emerged as a solution to these incompatibilities by using processes in-the-middle (called adapters) that allow the correct interaction between the services. There are several approaches that focused on the auto...

This article develops a model of a business customer’s decision to upgrade service contracts conditional on the decision to renew the contract. It proposes that the firm’s upgrade decision is influenced by (1) decision-maker perceptions of the relationship with the supplier, (2) contract-level experiences, and (3) interactions between firmand contract-level variables. The authors model the firm...

I many industries, Internet referral services, hosted either by independent third-party infomediaries or by manufacturers, serve as digitally enabled lead generators in electronic markets, directing consumer traffic to downstream retailers in a distribution network. This reshapes the extended enterprise from the traditional network of upstream manufacturers and downstream retailers to include m...

We address the question of optimal trading of bandwidth (service) contracts in wireless spectrum markets, for the primary as well as the secondary spectrum providers in this context. We propose a structured spectrum market and consider two basic types of spectrum contracts that can help attain desired flexibilities and trade-offs in terms of service quality, spectrum usage efficiency and pricin...