Normative conflicts in electronic contracts

Abstract

We are concerned with normative conflicts that arise for agents engaging in electronic contracting within an electronic marketplace. We identify a set of primitive conflict patterns, examine other analyses of conflicts found in the literature of distributed systems, legal reasoning and multi-agent interaction, and show how these may be seen as instances of primitive patterns. We also present additional patterns that have not been identified previously. Moreover, this work proposes and illustrates the representation of e-contracts in default logic, and argues that such a representation of contract norms as default rules facilitates the detection, prediction and resolution of normative conflicts.