Business Parties Research Articles

An adaptive coordination framework for fast atomic multi-business transactions using web services

Web services are emerging as an effective means for carrying out automated transactions between multiple business parties. While there are several specific protocols that have been discussed to address the problem of coordinating web services-enabled business transactions, we consider the tentative hold protocol (THP) that allows the placement of tentative holds on business resources prior to actual transactions in order to provide increased flexibility in coordination. In this paper, we present a formal coordination framework for applying THP in conjunction with two phase commit protocol to the problem in which service providers independently manage resources and clients seek to acquire the resources from multiple providers as a single atomic transaction. The proposed framework facilitates the performance optimization of THP through effective parameterization with the notion of overhold size and hold duration. Subsequently, a detailed analysis is carried out to obtain an efficient method that can optimize the performance by adaptively determining the hold duration. The simulation results show that the proposed adaptive approach yields a significant improvement over other non-adaptive policies.

Corporate Governance and Innovation - Venture Capital, Joint Ventures, and Family Businesses

Most of the literature on corporate governance focuses on listed companies. However, the majority of firms worldwide are non-listed. Given the importance of these firms for innovation and job creation, the absence of a robust debate on the best governance practices for these firms is perplexing. Corporate governance for non-listed companies, such as joint-ventures or venture-capital-backed start-ups and spin-offs, is concerned with ensuring that firms are run efficiently and protect the interests of business parties and investors. The article recounts the history of corporate governance from the development of the joint venture business form to the recent initiatives that help to foster the legal infrastructure to keep a modern economy in gear. We argue that the corporate governance debate for non-listed companies will proceed along three dimensions: (1) legal and institutional structures, (2) contractual arrangements, and (3) optional, best practice guidelines.

I. The 20th Session Of The Hague Conference: A New Choice Of Court Convention And The Issue Of Ec Memebership

On 30 June 2005 a Convention to respect choice of court agreements was finally born. The Hague Convention on Choice of Court Agreements aspires to be parallel to the New York Convention on the Recognition and Enforcement of Foreign Arbitral Awards (1958) (‘New York Convention’). The exception is that if an equally broadly accepted convention exists with respect to choice of court agreements,1 business parties will have an alternative to choosing arbitration in their contracts. If they have the assurance that a judgement will be recognized and enforced in a large number of States, some might be more inclined to insert a choice of court clause instead of an arbitration clause. This assumption has been confirmed by ICC research.2

DO WE NEED A HYBRID LAW OF CONTRACT? WHY HUGH COLLINS IS WRONG AND WHY IT MATTERS

IN Regulating Contracts Hugh Collins takes up the challenge presented by 40 years of empirical studies which show that business people make little use of contract law in settling disputes, preferring instead to rely on trust and various non-legal sanctions to organise their transactions. Indeed, business parties often actively avoid the use of law because of its expense, inconvenience and tendency to harm business relationships. These findings pose a challenge to traditional doctrinal scholars. If business parties do not make much use of contract law, one has to ask what role it does play and whether the attention that is paid to it by orthodox legal scholars is misplaced. Regulating Contracts takes on this challenge directly and is the most substantial attempt made so far to explain the role of contract law in light of the questions raised as to its usefulness.

A multi-party contract model

Contracts between multiple business parties play an increasingly important role in the global economy where activities along the value chain are executed by independent, yet co-operating, companies. Information technology to enact a value chain is now being deployed in the form of ERP systems, workflow systems, web services and e-marketplaces. However, there is little known on how to formally model a multi-party contract. In this paper, we investigate how to model a multi-party contract in a manner convenient for detecting the parties responsible for contract violations.

D. Osler, Labour Party plc: New Labour as a Party of Business, Mainstream, 2002, 256 pp., hb. 15.99

D. Osler, Labour Party plc: New Labour as a Party of Business, Mainstream, 2002, 256 pp., hb. 15.99

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier

That Obstinate Yet Elastic Natural Barrier

Information security management: The second generation

Information security has moved a long way from the early days when physical security, together with a set of backups, formed the backbone of a company's security controls. Today, information security is all about policies, standards, awareness programs, security strategies, etc. The aim of information security management efforts is to enhance confidence in the effectiveness of the information services within an organization. Unfortunately, this confidence is restricted to the organization itself and can only, with great effort, be passed on to external parties. Today, business partners need to link their computer systems for business reasons, but first want to receive some sort of proof that the other partner has got an adequate level of information security in place. A security evaluation and certification scheme that can instill confidence and assurance, regarding information security status, to external business parties will solve a lot of problems for the commercial world. This approach to Information Security Management, to proof adequate information security to external parties, is termed in this paper as; The Second Generation of Information Security Management.

Jurors' Judgments of Business Liability in Tort Cases: Implications for the Litigation Explosion Debate

Criticisms of the civil jury, including charges that the jury is biased against business, have been central to debates over the litigation explosion and demands for tort reform. This article seeks to inform these ongoing controversies by examining tort jurors' accounts of how they reached decisions in cases with business parties. Interviews and questionnaire data showed that jurors were skeptical of plaintiff tort claims against businesses, organized their accounts more on the actions and motivations of plaintiffs than on the responsibilities of business, and spoke often of the litigation crisis and the importance of limiting awards.

On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America

Jacksonian political history, once a battleground of academic controversy, has been a quiet field of late (see Fig. 1). The recent shift in interest toward social history in part accounts for the calm, a point to which I will return later. Just as important, however, Jacksonian political historians more or less killed off interest in the subject themselves by failing to move beyond their advances of the 1960s and by obscuring the question that had originally stirred so many of them to action: What were the relationships between class and politics in the early nineteenth-century United States? Now that the weaknesses of the new Jacksonian political history have been pointed out, it is proper to reflect on its rise and decline-and on why the social historians failed to construct their own interpretation of class and politics. It is also time to build on the social historians' reconceptualizations of class and social relations in nineteenth-century America, and offer a different approach to the social history of politics in the 1830s and 1840s. The great revision of Jacksonian politics began in earnest in the late 1940s, almost immediately after the publication of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s celebratory, The Age of Jackson. Richard Hofstadter's savage and bitter discussion of Andrew Jackson's place in the genealogy of American liberal politics set the tone. Once Hofstadter had done in the prevailing Progressive and New Deal myths about The Man of the People, all of the old simplifications about class and politics began to fall. On close examination, the leading Jacksonians were shown to be not champions of deprived workers and small farmers, but cold-blooded political entrepreneurs, often men of great wealth or men eager to become wealthy, whose main purpose was to get power and keep it. Jackson himself, it turned out, was an inconsistent opportunist, a shady land speculator, a political fraud-and a strikebreaker to boot.' It was left to Lee Benson to assault the Progressives' very concept of Jacksonian democracy, especially their ideas that the Whigs were a conservative business party and that party conflicts were the direct expressions of clashing

The Bases of Parti Québécois Support in Recent Quebec Elections

A l'aide de résultats électoraux et de données provenant de divers sondages, les auteurs tentent de trancher la controverse concernant l'influence de la classe sociale des électeurs sur leur propension à voter pour le Parti québécois. Ils constatent premièrement que toutes les études précédentes, sauf une, n'ont pas tenu compte de la langue d'usage des électeurs et, deuxièmement, que les résultats diffèrent selon que l'on a retenu, comme indice de la classe sociale des électeurs, leurs revenus, leur occupation ou leur éducation. La présente analyse, qui tient compte de la langue d'usage, de la répartition géographique (région montréalaise/reste du Québec) et de l'âge des électeurs, démontre qu'en aucune circonstance, les électeurs de statut socio-économique peu élevé n'appuient le Parti québécois davantage que ceux de statut plus élevé. Il se trouve par ailleurs des circonstances – surtout à l'extérieur de la région montréalaise – où les groupes de statut plus élevé sont proportionnellement bien plus nombreux à donner leur appui au Parti québécois. Diverses hypothèses sont avancées pour expliquer ces résultats, lesquels peuvent être interprétés, selon les auteurs, à l'aide d'un modèle fondé sur l'influence personnelle.