Relativized deontic modalities for contractual obligations in formal business communication

Abstract

Formal business communication is a process oriented (vs. document oriented) system for electronic interorganizational business transactions. It improves efficiency and effectiveness of business communications and often provides strategic advantages. Thanks to the current advances in information and telecommunications technologies, the development of formal business communication systems plays one of the key roles in the establishment of electronic commerce, or virtual interorganizational business transaction platform. The communication inputs of formal business communication, are sentences of speech acts, whose performative aspects construct deontic (i.e., normative) status between parties involved in the business transaction. The paper proposes the use of relativized deontic modalities as a component of electronic commerce systems. A notion of duty or obligation consists of a deontic content, an obligor, and an obligee. Also addressed is the practical issue of conflicts of duties and their resolution based on defeasibility reasoning. Finally, we suggest augmentation of the CASE/Open-EDI system with the proposed relativized deontic reasoning.