We consider a vertically related market where an upstream monopolist supplier trades, via interim observable two-part tariff contracts, with two differentiated downstream Cournot competitors. show that passive partial backward ownership (PPBO) is pro-competitive and welfare enhancing. PPBO exacerbates the monopolist’s commitment problem yields lower wholesale prices, higher industry output, con...

Renting software applications from an application service provider is generally assumed to provide significant overall cost savings. Whether these savings benefit the customer or provide high profit margins for the provider is a priori not clear. Lock-in of customers might reduce competition and enable the service provider to charge premium prices. We investigate in this paper the strength of l...

Electronic contracts (e-contracts) usually describe cross-organizational business processes defining electronic services to be provided and consumed as well as constraints on service execution such as, for instance, Quality of Service (QoS). Due to market dynamism, it is common that organizations involved in a cooperation need to do some adjustments in a pre-established e-contract. These change...

Rarely do firms sell their products directly to final consumers, instead selling through intermediary firms along a vertical supply chain. Vertical contracts between upstream firms (such as manufacturers) and downstream firms (such as retailers) involve negotiations about wholesale prices and other contractual terms that researchers and policy makers do not observe. This paper introduces a fram...

Within cloud and Internet-based collaborative settings, a business contract (service agreement) is a specification that describes permissible interactions between partners. Specifically, a business contract stipulates what operations the business partners have the rights, obligations or prohibitions to execute; it also specifies when the operations are to be executed and in which order. The mai...

Internet design principles do not focus on commercial service provisioning. Hence, support mechanisms need to be implemented in order to ensure that value added services can be offered in a competitive context. Commercial product offerings base on contractual agreements concluded between service providers and service customers. Contracts need to reflect business-driven requirements originating ...

This report presents some initial results of our research which addresses the increasing gaps between the power of multicore/multiprocessor systems and the lack of development models and tools that help programmers exploit such power while ensuring correctness and predictability. One specific goal of our research is to support service contracts on multicore/multiprocessor platforms that support...

Current protocols to agree to Web/Grid service usage do not have the capability to form negotiated agreements, nor do they take into account the legal requirements of the agreement process. This article presents a framework and a domain-independent negotiation protocol for creating legally binding contracts for service usage in a distributed, asynchronous service-oriented architecture. The nego...