A model of vertical integration is studied. Upstream firms sell differentiated inputs; downstream firms bundle them to make final products. Downstream products are sold as option contracts, which allow consumers to choose from a set of commodities at predetermined prices. The model is illustrated by examples in telecommunication and health markets. Equilibria of the integration game must result...

Service contracts (construed broadly, beyond web services and software, e.g. airline tickets and insurance policies) exhibit behavior that is rarely modeled completely in IT systems. This prevents consumers from automatically finding the contracts they need as well as providers from publishing the contracts they offer. We believe that the source of difficulty resides in the fact that these cont...

Many software applications are based on collaborating, yet competing, agents or virtual organisations exchanging services. Contracts, expressing obligations, permissions and prohibitions of the different actors, can be used to protect the interests of the organisations engaged in such service exchange. However, the potentially dynamic composition of services with different contracts, and the co...

This work presents the e-Cobra architecture, an on-demand resource allocation system based on service contracts, developed to address some of the problems in the deployment and management of network based application services. The architecture supports business rules representation extracted from negotiated contracts between the involved parts (providers and customers). From these contracts, po...

Electronic contracts (e-contracts) create obligations, permissions, and prohibitions for the parties in the Internet. However, the support to interpret and enforce the clauses related to contracts is limited in current implementations. Besides, e-contracts must follow the continuous change of business rules. The service provider must make available the services that enable the parties to satisf...

In the context of service-oriented computing, behavioural contracts are abstract descriptions of the message-passing behaviour of services. They can be used to check properties of service compositions such as, for instance, clientservice compliance. Previous formal models for contracts consider unidirectional send and receive operations. In this paper, we present two models for contracts with b...

Monopolies appear throughout health care. We show that health insurance operates like a conventional two-part pricing contract that allows monopolists to extract profits without inefficiently constraining quantity. When insurers are free to offer a range of insurance contracts to different consumer types, health insurance markets perfectly eliminate deadweight losses from upstream health care m...

An Open Service Architecture is a framework that supports an open set of users to subscribe to, and pay for, an open set of services. Such architectures provide an excellent application area for Agent Oriented Programming. It is useful to describe the collaboration between agents in terms of Service Contracts, that agents can form dynamically through negotiation. The negotiation of Service Cont...

In the current bandwidth market, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) provide guaranteed Internet bandwidth within their domains. However, they are incapable of providing such assurances for data crossing their domain boundaries. In this paper, we present a spot pricing scheme for Internet bandwidth contracts within an ISP domain. These models when implemented at access or exchange points of diffe...