Over the past fifteen years, U.S. households in the aggregate have devoted an increasing share of their after-tax income to the payment of financial obligations. Much of the increase is attributable to a rise in the level of credit card debt, which has raised the share of households’ aggregate after-tax income that is devoted to credit card payments. In turn, the rising share of credit card deb...

Group-oriented web information systems (GWISs) are web-based dataintensive systems that are used by a group of people in order to fulfill common tasks. In particular, there are different roles for the users, each associated with some rights and obligations. The group orientation implies that some of these obligations and rights depend on actions done by other roles. In this article a deontic lo...

Bioethicists have long debated the content of sponsors and researchers' obligations of justice in international clinical research. However, there has been little empirical investigation as to whether and how obligations of responsiveness, ancillary care, post-trial benefits and research capacity strengthening are upheld in low- and middle-income country settings. In this paper, the authors argu...

We propose, as part of an agent architecture, a system where contracts are represented as first-class entities to allow the relationships between agents to be specified and developed separately from their built-in capabilities. The contracts allow the agent’s problem-solving ability to be augmented by the potential of outsourcing tasks and obligations to other agents. The contracts also allow t...