Design by contract is a well-established paradigm in software engineering. Bertrand Meyer first introduced the rigorous distinction between the responsibilities of service provider and service consumer for fine grain software artifacts (classes). This paper considers service contracts in the context of service-oriented architecture for complex enterprise information infrastructures. Identifying...

The contract age ofmajority is currently age eighteen. Contracts entered into by minors under this age are generally voidable at the minor's option. This contract doctrine of capacity is based on the policy ofprotecting minors from their own poor financial decisions and lack of adultlike judgment. Conversely, the age of eighteen is currently set as the arbitrary age at which one will be bound t...

The blockchain underlying Bitcoin is moving beyond money and into record keeping and law. This essay explores recent efforts to harness the ledger-like qualities of blockchains to create contracts. Along the way, it considers the forms and functions of other historical examples of ledgers, the dynamics of visibility and publicity, and shifts in the incentive structure of blockchain systems. Dis...

This paper considers the multiperiod hedging decision in a framework of mean-reverting spot prices and unbiased futures markets. The task is to determine the optimal hedging path, i.e., the sequence of positions in futures contracts with the objective of minimizing the variance of an uncertain future cash flow. The model is used to illustrate both hedging using a matchedmaturity futures contrac...

Nowadays, in the markets of broadband access services, traditional contracts are of “static” type. Customers buy the right to use a specific amount of resources for a specific period of time. On the other hand, modern services and applications render the demand for bandwidth highly variable and bursty. New types of contracts emerge (“dynamic contracts”) which allow customers to dynamically adju...

Based on a representative national sample of 1564 academic researchers, we investigate the impacts of research grants and contracts on the nature and extent of faculty research and technology activities with industry. A particular focus is on understanding the independent contributions of industry and government grant sources on levels of industrial involvement. In addition to examining the sou...

This study considers accounting in the new information economy. The basic framework of accounting for firms reflects a set of contracts and it helps define, implement and enforce these contracts. This framework is stable, and unlikely to change soon. However, the new information technology has been transforming the markets in which firms operate, and opening up new markets. We use a taxonomy id...

The normative concepts offer a principled basis for engineering flexible multiagent systems for business and other crossorganizational settings. However, producing suitable specifications is nontrivial: the difficulty is an obstacle to the adoption of multiagent systems in industry. This paper considers normative relationships of six main types, namely, commitments (both practical and dialectic...