A Theory of Agreements and Protection

We present a theory of contracts. Contracts are interacting processes with an explicit notion of obligations and objectives. We model processes and their obligations as event structures. We define a general notion of agreement, by interpreting contracts as multi-player concurrent games. A participan...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPrinciples of Security and Trust pp. 186 - 205
Main Authors Bartoletti, Massimo, Cimoli, Tiziana, Zunino, Roberto
Format Book Chapter
LanguageEnglish
Published Berlin, Heidelberg Springer Berlin Heidelberg
SeriesLecture Notes in Computer Science
Subjects
Circular Causality
Circular Dependency
Event Structure
Fair Play
Winning Strategy
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Summary:We present a theory of contracts. Contracts are interacting processes with an explicit notion of obligations and objectives. We model processes and their obligations as event structures. We define a general notion of agreement, by interpreting contracts as multi-player concurrent games. A participant agrees on a contract if she has a strategy to reach her objectives (or make another participant chargeable for a violation), whatever the moves of her adversaries. We then tackle the problem of protection. A participant is protected by a contract when she has a strategy to defend herself in all possible contexts, even in those where she has not reached an agreement. We show that, in a relevant class of contracts, agreements and protection mutually exclude each other. We then propose a novel formalism for modelling contractual obligations: event structures with circular causality. Using this model, we show how to construct contracts which guarantee both agreements and protection.
ISBN:3642368298
9783642368295
ISSN:0302-9743
1611-3349
DOI:10.1007/978-3-642-36830-1_10