Most individuals strive to satisfy every obligation laid out in standard form contracts such as mortgages, insurance plans, or credit agreements. Sophisticated parties, however, adapt and modify their obligations during contract performance by negotiating for lenient treatment taking advantage of unclear terms. The common law explicitly authorizes variance from standardized terms performance. W...

In this paper, we present work in progress on the Electronic Contract Framework, an agent-based framework for the automation of contractual relationships. Electronic contracts are the cornerstone of this framework and contractual agents manipulate these abstractions to specify business relationships and to automate their execution. We first define the concepts and the formalism used to model el...

Our purpose in this paper is to provide an overview of what we know about alliance contracts. After a short introduction to the contents of alliance contracts, we start by contrasting alliance contractual form and governance form. Next, we focus on two related constructs: contractual complexity and contractual completeness. We suggest that contractual complexity is a more adequate construct to ...

Current ideas about the role of the state include an enthusiasm for mechanisms of "indirect" or "third-party" governance. The health care arena, in which models of indirect governance have a long history, is an important test bed for these ideas. Classically, the arena was marked by trust-based, principal-agent relationships established to overcome information gaps. Over time (and to different ...

We expect engineers, much as we expect doctors, teachers, plumbers, bankers and even our politicians to be honest. Minimally this means that they should not cheat, falsify documents or reports, keep promises and adhere to contractual obligations. But more can be said about the relation between engineering and ethics. Enlarging what it means to be an engineer is to understand the responsibility ...

s:1462:"Informed consent is central to the doctor-patient relationship and especially to respect the autonomy of the patient that is one of the four principles of biomedical ethics. According to article 190 of Civil Code "consent of both parties is an essential provision for a contract to be made" and according to the definition of contract under Article 183 of the same code, it seems that the ...

We obtained detailed quantitative and interview data from Aetna U.S. Healthcare and six physician organizations to examine changes between 1998 and 2000 in the scope of capitation contracting and delegation of responsibility for claims payment and medical management in New York and California. The physician organizations in New York included Benchmark (Continuum), Montefiore IPA, and Lenox Hill...

Engineers of safety-critical systems have a duty to address ethical issues that may arise in the development, assessment, operation and maintenance of these systems. Dealing with ethical dilemmas during safety risk assessment is particularly challenging, especially when making and justifying decisions concerning risk acceptability. This is particularly complicated by organisational issues and c...