Related papers: Digital Social Contracts: A Foundation for an Egal…
A companion paper defined the notion of digital social contracts, presented a design for a social-contracts programming language, and demonstrated its potential utility via example social contracts. The envisioned setup consists of people…
Contracts are an essential and fundamental component of commerce and society, serving to clarify agreement between multiple parties. While digital technologies have helped to automate many activities associated with contracting, the…
We characterize digital cash as the digital equivalent of physical cash: secure, fungible, decentralized, directly controlled, privacy-preserving; but enhanced with qualitatively new functionality. It is extremely efficiently transferable…
A smart contract is a computer program which allows users to automate their actions on the blockchain platform. Given the significance of smart contracts in supporting important activities across industry sectors including supply chain,…
"Code is law" refers to the idea that, with the advent of digital technology, code has progressively established itself as the predominant way to regulate the behavior of Internet users. Yet, while computer code can enforce rules more…
Smart contracts are a new paradigm that emerged with the rise of the blockchain technology. They allow untrusting parties to arrange agreements. These agreements are encoded as a programming language code and deployed on a blockchain…
Smart contracts are computer programs that can be consistently executed by a network of mutually distrusting nodes, without the arbitration of a trusted authority. Because of their resilience to tampering, smart contracts are appealing in…
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…
A blockchain-based smart contract or a "smart contract" for short, is a computer program intended to digitally facilitate the negotiation or contractual terms directly between users when certain conditions are met. With the advance in…
In an era of ubiquitous data collection, platform dominance, and AI-mediated governance, the social contract of digital life is increasingly shaped by a few private actors rather than democratic deliberation. This paper advances a…
Smart contracts are the building blocks of the "code is law" paradigm: the smart contract's code indisputably describes how its assets are to be managed - once it is created, its code is typically immutable. Faulty smart contracts present…
Smart contracts are computer programs that are executed by a network of mutually distrusting agents, without the need of an external trusted authority. Smart contracts handle and transfer assets of considerable value (in the form of…
The moral authority of ethics codes stems from an assumption that they serve a unified society, yet this ignores the political aspects of any shared resource. The sociologist Howard S. Becker challenged researchers to clarify their power…
Like any technology, AI systems come with inherent risks and potential benefits. It comes with potential disruption of established norms and methods of work, societal impacts and externalities. One may think of the adoption of technology as…
As more and more data is collected for various reasons, the sharing of such data becomes paramount to increasing its value. Many applications ranging from smart cities to personalized health care require individuals and organizations to…
A smart contract is a translation of a standard paper-based contract that can be enforced and executed by a contract management system. At a high level of abstraction, a contract is only a document that describes how the signing parties are…
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…
In this position paper, we consider some foundational topics regarding smart contracts (such as terminology, automation, enforceability, and semantics) and define a smart contract as an automatable and enforceable agreement. We explore a…
Formal verification entails testing software to ensure it operates as specified. Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement directly written into lines of code. They run on blockchain platforms and…
With the ever increasing importance of web services and the Cloud as a reliable commodity to provide business value as well as consolidate IT infrastructure, electronic contracts have become very important. WS-Agreement has itself…