Checking correctness of business contracts via commitments

Abstract

Business contracts tend to be complex. In current practice, contracts are often designed by hand and adopted by their participants after, at best, a manual analysis. This paper motivates and formalizes two aspects of contract correctness from the perspective of the preferences of the agents participating in them. A contract is safe for a participant if participating in the contract would not leave the participant worse off than otherwise. More strongly, a contract is beneficial to a participant if participating in the contract would leave the participant better off than otherwise. This paper seeks to partially automate reasoning about the correctness of formally modeled business contracts. It represents contracts formally as a set of commitments. It motivates constraints on how cooperative agents might value the various states of commitments. Further, it shows that such constraints are consistent and promote cooperation. Lastly, it presents algorithms for checking the safety and guaranteed benefits of a contract. Copyright © 2008, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.