Contracts in e-commerce

Abstract

Electronic Commerce involves coordination between different organizations using communication technology. The coordination can be achieved in the form of an electronic market or a virtual enterprise. In both cases, contracts play a central role. In the Electronic Market, contracts are agreements on a specific business transaction. In a Virtual Enterprise, the contract is a cooperation agreement for a longer period involving integrated business processes. A general framework of business communication is presented that is applied to a case study. We argue that an agent society model is most suitable for implementing contracts. © 2003 by International Federation for Information Processing.