Contracts and Conflicts in E-Commerce

Abstract

E-commerce participants are joining electronic markets with pre-existing requirements concerning the legal, business and privacy contexts in which they formally enter into contracts and transactions. However, both the productivity of and trust in these electronic market environments is limited as current e-commerce protocols for negotiation and contract agreements lack the capability of detecting conflicts in contracts.

The objective of this project is to develop a prototype that will enhance the integrity of electronic markets through the development of a system that will show how logic can represent contractual requirements, and how logic tools can help check these requirements for agreement or conflicts.

Background

In the future, the electronic commerce world will be populated by agents that receive instructions from their human masters and will take initiatives concerning entering into contractual situations, and resolving related conflicts. Eventually, real people and automatic agents will have interchangeable roles, and therefore their normative worlds will have to be seamlessly integrated. Agents must conform to human law; and Agreement development and conflict resolution in the human world and in the agent world must then be mutually consistent.

Today, e-commerce participants are joining electronic markets with pre-existing requirements concerning the legal, business and privacy contexts in which they formally enter into contracts and transactions. However, both the productivity of and trust in these electronic market environments is limited, as current e-commerce protocols for negotiation and contract agreements lack the capability of detecting conflicts in contracts.

Project Description

The objective of this project to develop a prototype system that will show how logic can represent contractual requirements and how logic tools can help check these requirements for agreement or conflicts. The process of finding suitable matches, in the presence of complex requirements, will be facilitated through a solution whereby these requirements can be formally represented, checked and dynamically modified in a readable and efficient manner.

Project Significance

The results of this project will significantly advance the research knowledge and tools required to increase the level of productivity associated with, and the level of trust necessary for parties to confidently enter into electronic contracts and transactions in an e-commerce environment. As such, the anticipated project outcomes will contribute, in an important way, to the evolution of a future, in which e-commerce Agents conform to human law; and Agreement development and conflict resolution in both the human and the agent world are mutually consistent.

Approach and Methodology

This project will start with the identification of the aspects of electronic contracts that need to be considered to address the real e-business issues: how do agents find partners with which they enter into contracts? How do two agents entering into a contract determine where their respective requirements meet, and how do they differ? When is the difference small enough to be ignored, and when is it significant enough so that the requirements need to be modified, or another partner needs to be found? Can the difference be met in a negotiation process? Is the contract consistent with the legal context in which each agent operates?

Having defined the scope of the project and the specific problems to be addressed, our team will identify the knowledge representation and the inference mechanism that will be used to build a proof-of-concept prototype environment in which we will simulate and research contracts between agents. We propose to consider logic programming as the representation language, and standard Prolog as the inference mechanism. This approach will allow us to obtain the prototype quickly and to focus the project on the issues rather than lower-level implementation details.

Research Team

The Research team assembled for this project includes Dr. Stan Matwin, Dr.Amy Felty, Dr.Gregory Kersten and Dr. Luigi Logrippo, all of who bring unique and complementary expertise to this project. The team also includes two graduate students.

• Dr. Stan Matwin, Professor of Information Technology and Engineering, School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) at the University of Ottawa, brings expertise in the area of expert systems, intelligent agents and artificial intelligence, as well as specific expertise on modeling negotiations using logic-based representations and inference mechanisms.

• Dr. Amy Felty, Associate Professor in the School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) at the University of Ottawa brings expertise in the areas of logic, semantics, and automatic theorem proving for feature interaction detection.

• Dr. Gregory Kersten, Professor at the School of Management, University of Ottawa is an expert in the areas of behavioural and formal methods of negotiations, and e-negotiation systems and software agents; he has constructed logic-based and optimization models of conflict detection and resolution, and assessments of the negotiator’s strength of opposition and constraint relaxation; he has also developed systems and software agents used for negotiation support and methodology-based advice.

• Dr. Luigi Logrippo, Adjunct Professor School of Information Technology and Engineering (SITE) at the University of Ottawa will bring expertise in the area of feature interaction detection and resolution in telecom systems; as well he has a first degree in law, which will allow him to tackle legal concepts with confidence.