Online purchase and delivery of goods and services requires an electronic contracting process. Formalization of contractual content enables automatic delivery of services and monitoring of the terms and conditions of the contract at service runtime. The Simple Obligation and Right Model (SORM) provides an abstract, domain-independent model of contractual content. Model instances can be interpre...

Problems of developing specialized financial services for housing are acute in transition socialist economies (TSE). Some constraints derive from the incomplete and imperfect privatization of the real estate sector. Others reflect the fragmented and undeveloped financial system. This paper examines a financial instrument, contractual savings for housing (CSH), that is often advocated as a major...

This study provides a systematic analysis of the VIP-room contractual system of Macau’s traditional casino industry. It examines the system’s historical background, its organizational structure, its operational mechanisms, and its role in Macau’s casino industry. This analysis examines the evolving and likely future changes in the VIP-room sector—as well as the mass market sector—caused by the ...

This paper discusses how model checking, a technique used for the verification of behavioural requirements of dynamic systems, can be usefully deployed for the verification of contracts. A process view of agreements between parties is taken, whereby a contract is modelled as it evolves over time in terms of actions or more generally events that effect changes in its state. Modelling is done wit...

One influential approach to assessing the"goodness"of arguments is offered by the Pragma-Dialectical school (p-d) (Eemeren&Grootendorst 1992). This can be compared with Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST) (Mann&Thompson 1988), an approach that originates in discourse analysis. In p-d terms an argument is good if it avoids committing a fallacy, whereas in RST terms an argument is good if it is coh...

A Web-based multi purpose contractual management system can provide support to contractual process workflows for different types of contractual process of unilateral, bilateral or multilateral contracts. These processes can be done on-line i.e. Web-based without the need for all actors to be synchronously present with respect to both time and space. Different contractual processes of initializa...

The need to use position-dependent parameters often hampers the definition of flexible, extensible, and reusable abstractions for software composition. This observation has led us to explore the concept of forms, which are first-class extensible records and that, in combination with a small set of purely asymmetric operators, provide a core language to address this issue. One interesting applic...