Related papers: Contracts in distributed systems
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…
We develop denotational and operational semantics designed with continuations for process calculi based on CCS extended with mechanisms offering support for multiparty interactions. We investigate the abstractness of this continuation…
A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…
We present a partial operator-theoretic characterization of approachability principle and based on this characterization, we interpret a particular distributed payoff allocation algorithm to be a sequence of time-varying paracontractions.…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…
Concurrent pattern calculus (CPC) drives interaction between processes by comparing data structures, just as sequential pattern calculus drives computation. By generalising from pattern matching to pattern unification, interaction becomes…
Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…
We propose a formal approach for specifying and implementing decentralised coordination in distributed systems, with a focus on smart contracts. Our model captures dynamic roles, data-driven transitions, and external coordination…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…
Formal reasoning about distributed algorithms (like Consensus) typically requires to analyze global states in a traditional state-based style. This is in contrast to the traditional action-based reasoning of process calculi. Nevertheless,…
This paper presents TXSC, a framework that provides smart contract developers with transaction primitives. These primitives allow developers to write smart contracts without the need to reason about the anomalies that can arise due to…
We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…
In distributed systems, where multi-party communication is essential, two communication paradigms are ever present: (1) one-to-many, commonly denoted as broadcast; and (2) many-to-one denoted as aggregation or collection. In this paper we…
We present a process algebra based approach to formalize the interactions of computing devices such as the representation of policies and the resolution of conflicts. As an example we specify how promises may be used in coming to an…
The complexity of large-scale distributed systems, particularly when deployed in physical space, calls for new mechanisms to address composability and reusability of collective adaptive behaviour. Computational fields have been proposed as…
In this paper we explore the structure and applicability of the Distributed Measurement Calculus (DMC), an assembly language for distributed measurement-based quantum computations. We describe the formal language's syntax and semantics,…
Smart Contracts use computer technology to automate the performance of aspects of commercial agreements. Yet how can there be confidence that the computer code is faithful to the intentions of the parties? To understand the depth and…