Contract Rules Research Articles

FULL LAMBEK CALCULUS WITH CONTRACTION IS UNDECIDABLE

AbstractWe prove that the set of formulae provable in the full Lambek calculus with the structural rule of contraction is undecidable. In fact, we show that the positive fragment of this logic is undecidable.

Chapter 12: License Contracts, Free Software and Creative Commons in the Hungarian Law

The Hungarian Copyright Act (HCA) includes a separate chapter on the terms of license (“use”) contracts. The provisions of the HCA serve as lex specialis against the background of general and special rules of contract law codified by the Hungarian Civil Code (HCC). From a historical point of view, the birth of software as a new type of protected work encouraged the reform of copyright contract rules. Nevertheless, the HCA does not contain specific rules on FOSS and CC licenses. It has certain rules on non-written (oral) contracts, introduced especially for these types of licenses entering into Hungarian legal practice. Both pieces of legislation mentioned above apply in relation to FOSS and CC licenses.

Debt Covenant Violations and Auditor Monitoring

We present new evidence on debt covenant violation (DCV) consequences that have not previously been examined in the literature. In particular, we show that a DCV triggers significant information asymmetry and uncertainty on the part of shareholders and auditors as reflected in higher bid-ask spreads, return volatility, and audit fees. Further, these consequences occur even when lender-imposed costs are relatively lower, consistent with the act of default itself triggering shareholder and auditor uncertainty. The results highlight costs to the firm of having bright-line rules in contracts, and add to an understanding of the consequences of DCVs.

Exposing Uncertainty in Bid Preparation of Steel Construction Cost Estimating: I. Conceptual Framework and Qualitative C-I-V-I-L Classification

AbstractIn construction cost estimating, bid documents—drawings and specifications—are a primary means to communicate design intent to bidders who then extract cost item quantities. However, uncertainties in conveying information affect the accuracy of quantity takeoffs. Therefore, the goal of this research is to explore types of uncertainties that hamper the quantity takeoff process. This text analyzes bid documents, including architectural, structural, and other plans of real-world school projects with structural steel frames in the Washington, DC metropolitan area. Contributions to the body of knowledge are (1) deriving a classification of five major types from 67 minor uncertainties as collected in the Conflicting/Incomplete/Vague/Incorrect/Lack-of-Work-Assignment (C-I-V-I-L) mnemonic; (2) establishing a framework of information flow between bid participants to explain how uncertainties arise; and (3) extracting contradictions between current contract rules to resolve conflicts in bid documents. This ...

Social and Technical Determinants of Perceived Contract Performance: Rules, Autonomy, and Ethics

ABSTRACTContracting for services represents one mechanism employed to improve the performance of government agencies. While research examining contract performance sheds substantial light on the circumstances under which contracting achieves intended goals, it has rarely considered how the technical and human factors of the contracting process jointly affect contract performance. As a result, relatively little is known about how human factors affect contract performance under shifting technical contingencies. This gap is addressed by exploring how autonomy over contract management and perceived ethical behavior (social factors) are contingent upon changes in contract rules training (a technical factor). The study finds that contract managers who have had more rules training tend to believe that they have less autonomy and view the behaviors of others as unethical. Findings also indicate that more training in contracting rules may inhibit perceived contract performance when mediated by autonomy and perceptions of ethical behaviors.

Major personality traits and regulations of social behavior: Cheaters are not the same as the reckless, and you need to know who you’re dealing with

This research explores the hypothesis that major personality traits are systematically associated with social regulation response tendencies. Specifically, the adaptive function of specific traits from ‘Big-Five’ and HEXACO models were evaluated in terms of how they are understood and utilized in predicting the behaviors of others. Big-Five factors of agreeableness and conscientiousness track tendencies to obey or break social contract and precautionary rules, but not discriminatively nor as predicted. HEXACO traits, however, provided discriminative patterns of associations between personality and response tendencies (within individuals and for third-person associations, cross-culturally) in greater accord with previous work. Honesty–humility is associated with social contract behaviors and conscientiousness is associated with precaution behaviors, consistent with conceptualizations as psychological adaptations for tracking fitness-relevant individual differences.

Mathematics and didactic contract in Swedish preschools

The purpose of this article is to study and analyse how a teacher implements an outdoor realistic problem situation for children aged 4–5 in a Swedish preschool. By an ‘outdoor realistic problem situation', I mean a situation initiated by a teacher in which children come into contact with mathematical concepts and in which the outside environment is used to encourage learning. The analysis and interpretation of the data has been influenced by the didactical situation theory and didactic contract is a key concept. The term didactic contract is seen as a metaphor, consequently a broader definition of the didactic contract is used to illustrate how the implicit and the explicit rules of a didactic contract affect the communication of mathematics between a preschool teacher and a children's group.

Contracts and Automation: Exploring the Normativity of Automation in the Context of U.S. Contract Law and E.U. Consumer Protection Directives

Given a choice between two systems of contract rules, a court or legislature may have a normative obligation to adopt the rule that is more susceptible to coding and automation. This paper explores the ramifications of that normative proposition through the lens of multiple contract doctrines that traditionally involve “messy” judgments or multiple interacting judgments regarding which human beings are – arguably – capable of making finely nuanced analyses. Using the common law doctrine of unconscionability and Polish Civil Code Article 385 on unfair terms in consumer contracts, this paper explores the differences between contract rules that require human analysis versus those that can be applied with strong reliability by automated processes. Finally, the paper analyzes some of the potential pitfalls of this normative proposition in light of technological, economic, and moral/ethical concerns.

Ethiopian Sales Law in the Light of International Laws and Principles of Contract

Contract laws are determinant factors in fostering both domestic and international trade. The better a country has efficient contract rules, the more it attracts trade and investment. This paper is aiming to provide a comparative analysis of the Ethiopian sales law in the light of CISG, PECL, and UNIDROIT Principles. It analyzes the different possibilities of application of these instruments in comparison to Ethiopian law of sales. Major finding of the article revealed that, except few provisions, Ethiopia’s sales law was adopted considering the then time international standards and principles of contract. The paper also strives to forward specific recommendations on amending outdated provisions in the Ethiopian contract and sales law.

Open Price for Iran: The Bases for Reform

The rules of sale contract in many countries allow parties to conclude a contract without specifying the price at the time of formation. Such contracts are called open price sale (sale of goods) contracts and are of the needs of modern trade methods. As a result, parties enjoy the freedom to conclude their contract without contractual risks. The problem, however, is that under the Iranian rules on sale contracts, these possibilities do not exist. Such treatment by Iranian legislators on the issue of price in a sale contract has caused problems in national and transactional level. Adopting a doctrinal research method, the first aim of this study is to perform a review on the concept of open price term and the current Iranian law on this concept. The next objective is to explain the justifications for acceptance of open price term with regard to global evolutions, legal theories and Islamic theories and principles. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n4s3p166

The Conceptual Framework of Design Change Effects in Some Project Delivery Systems

Changes will always occur in project construction and can not be avoided. Many factors can cause changes in the construction project. Most dominant factors of cause of changes in project construction is design change. Design changes will have bad impact on the performance of construction projects, especially the performance of cost and performance time. Many factors can be the cause of design changes. Knowing the factors that cause a design change and knowing its behavior is very important to do. Knowing factor and behavioral of design changes that occur in project construction, and then can be managed properly, it will can be reduce the occurrence of design changes in projects construction. With the reduction of design changes will be able to improve the performance of construction projects, especially at cost and time performance. Construction projects carried out by using a project delivery system. Each project delivery system used will have different contractual relationships, rules, and responsibilities of each party involved. These differences will lead to in the occurrence differences in design change in project construction. Selection of appropriate project delivery system to complete a construction project is needed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a conceptual framework that can be used to determine the behavior, and the effect of design changes on project construction at some project delivery system used.

European Online Marketplace – New Measures for Consumer Protection against “Old Conflict of Laws Rules”

The paper aims at discussing the rationale for protecting consumers under the new directive on consumer rights (CRD) and its relation to conflict of law rules under the Regulation on the law applicable to contractual obligations (Rome I).The author is of the opinion the newly adopted legal framework for consumer protection under the directive on consumer rights seems to be more predictable especially in terms of supporting consumers with more mandatory information before the conclusion of a contract with a professional as well as a single 14 day withdrawal period for all Member States. However, the level of consumer protection in the purchase of digital content is insufficient and from the perspective of conflict of laws rules for consumer contracts under Rome I, a consumer who actively makes a purchase from a professional from another Member State or a third country cannot expect the special protective rules envisaged in the regime under CRD and Rome I to be applied by default; rather, the general rules come into play.

The decidability of the intensional fragment of classical linear logic

The intensional fragment of classical propositional linear logic combines modalities with contraction-free relevance logic — adding modalized versions of the thinning and contraction rules. This paper provides a proof of the decidability of this logic based on a sequent calculus formulation. Some related logics and some other fragments of linear logic are also shown decidable.

Comparative Analysis of Procedural of Alternative Dispute Resolution in Building Construction

Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) has many advantages in the process of construction dispute settlement. Standard construction contracts like AIA, FIDIC or ICE contract create their own ADR procedural rules to ensure advantages of ADR under the context of different rules. But each has different characteristics and focuses besides some common characteristics. Clarifying the ADR procedural rules can help prepare specific construction contracts and settle the disputes effectively. The aim of this paper is to comparatively analyze the ADR procedural rules in standard contract documents to study why these rules exist, and what are the same and different points among them. The AIA A201 contract, FIDIC condition of contract for construction and ICE Engineering and Construction Contract are selected to conduct the comparison because of their representativeness. The definition and common methods of ADR are firstly analyzed and identified as the scope of this research. Then a game theory is introduced to analyze the advantages of adopting ADR compared to other dispute resolution methods. The procedures of ADR in standard contracts are compared to find out the same and different aspects among these rules. Through the comparative analysis, the application conditions of ADR are found. Project participants can better understand the relationship between ADR procedural rules and laws, and also adjust these rules with different circumstances. The results of the comparative analysis provide reference for the development of ADR in practice.

UNDECIDABILITY OF CONSEQUENCE RELATION IN FULL NON-ASSOCIATIVE LAMBEK CALCULUS

AbstractWe prove that the consequence relation in the Full Non-associative Lambek Calculus is undecidable. An encoding of the halting problem for 2-tag systems using finitely many sequents in the language {⋅,∨} is presented. Therefore already the consequence relation in this fragment is undecidable. Moreover, the construction works even when the structural rules of exchange and contraction are added.

Social Preference and Governance: A Case Study in India

This study investigates the relationship between social choice and fiscal performance in India since 1991. Social choice is simple measurement in public affair activities like participating in election. Vote turnover in a democracy is taken to measure trust on institution. Social trust is considered as a proxy of social capital. Truly, the percentage vote turnover is the measurement of the level of citizens’ chance to express their preferences, which certainly help to increase governmental responsibility and accountability and thereby government performance. Here, the government is forced to be responsive to citizens’ preferences and the underlying social contract rule, which leads to a higher level of fiscal discipline. Using principal component analysis we construct social capital index that captures both structural and cultural aspects. Fiscal institution in India becomes weak in the post reform era. Group of politicians are much more interest about their local or regional issues than national issues even they are not interested to formulate regional development policy through discussion in the Parliament of India. Here higher value of social index indicates higher level of social trust as proxy of higher social capital. High social capital inversely affects the fiscal performance.

Precedent in Contract Cases and the Importance(?) of the Whole Story

I am honored to contribute to this symposium in honor of Bill Whitford. I have been an admirer of Bill's work for the past 39 years, which encompasses my entire teaching career. Bill's scholarship on contracts and consumer law in his law review articles and in his casebook, Contracts: Law in Action, now in its third edition with Macaulay, Braucher, and Kidwell, confirms the importance of examining the non-legal forces at work in exchange transactions, the sometimes tenuous relationship between contract rules and legal decisions, the limitations of legal opinions, and the value of focusing on the relationship of contracting parties. In this essay, I begin with a brief description of Bill and his coauthors' casebook in order to capture the contributions and importance of their perspective on teaching contract law. I then turn to Bill and Stewart Macaulay's recent debate with Bob Scott on the meaning of the record in Hoffman v. Red Owl Stores, a case that figures prominently in Bill and Stewart's and most other casebooks. I use the fascinating back and forth between these three prominent authors as a jumping off point to ponder the appropriate role of telling the whole story in important cases.

The Computational Complexity of Propositional Cirquent Calculus

Introduced in 2006 by Japaridze, cirquent calculus is a refinement of sequent calculus. The advent of cirquent calculus arose from the need for a deductive system with a more explicit ability to reason about resources. Unlike the more traditional proof-theoretic approaches that manipulate tree-like objects (formulas, sequents, etc.), cirquent calculus is based on circuit-style structures called cirquents, in which different "peer" (sibling, cousin, etc.) substructures may share components. It is this resource sharing mechanism to which cirquent calculus owes its novelty (and its virtues). From its inception, cirquent calculus has been paired with an abstract resource semantics. This semantics allows for reasoning about the interaction between a resource provider and a resource user, where resources are understood in the their most general and intuitive sense. Interpreting resources in a more restricted computational sense has made cirquent calculus instrumental in axiomatizing various fundamental fragments of Computability Logic, a formal theory of (interactive) computability. The so-called "classical" rules of cirquent calculus, in the absence of the particularly troublesome contraction rule, produce a sound and complete system CL5 for Computability Logic. In this paper, we investigate the computational complexity of CL5, showing it is $\Sigma_2^p$-complete. We also show that CL5 without the duplication rule has polynomial size proofs and is NP-complete.

C'è lavoro sul web?

Is there work on web? Can we distinguish web-users between workers? What innovative ways takes digital activity? Is it possible to identify typical professional profiles and trades on web? Can the extreme accessibility and impersonality of the web create genuine employment relationships and support production processes? Is there a way to apply labour rules and protections to experiences that intentionally take advantage of extraterritoriality, autarky and polycentric dimension of Internet?The questions raised by the Author underline that the web, rather than simply providing means and support to the movement of information in advantage of the labour market traditional players (companies, workers, private agencies, public employment services), has instead developed autonomously its own potential. On one hand, the web has became a professional intermediary, using the capabilities of computing devices and search engine that offer global employment services 2.0; on the other hand, has caused the “dis-intermediation” towards institutional operators (public and private) through the dissemination of informal circuits, sites of social recruiting, and also civic networks aimed at intercepting interstitial job opportunities.Moreover, the web tends increasingly to exchange or combine the role of the intermediary and the one of the employer in the labour market, making available - at least potentially - a virtual, but global, space for outsourcing. The A. reflects, in particular, on legal characterization of digital work through crowdsourcing and on the application of rules of contracts and Agency work.Although work on web is difficult to recognize, measure and regulate in legal terms, it has been observed that the use of technological devices and digital services mark the rebirth of the - in its original, ancient meaning of the practice of an art or the expression of a talent - in contrast to the profession established in the high twentieth century through a bureaucratic public organization. The network is the means and the support of the professed by digital workers, but is both the object and purpose of the trade itself. Means and end often coincide.

Interpretive Preferences and the Limits of the New Formalism

A recent movement in contracts scholarship-the so-called New Formalism-seeks to justify limitations on the introduction of extrinsic evidence to interpret contracts on the instrumental grounds of efficiency and empirical observation. Less attention has been directed at the development of a similar instrumental argument for the more contextual types of interpretation observed in the Uniform Commercial Code and the Restatement (Second) of Contracts. This Article engages this question by arguing that the relative ability of transactors to draft complete contracts is likely to be an important determinant of their preferred interpretive regime. Where low contracting costs allow commercial parties to draft relatively complete contracts, it is understandable that these parties would have a strong preference for formal contract rules. This approach may best ensure the interpretation of these contracts in accordance with their express terms. But when contracts are more difficult to write-and hence contain more gapstransactors may prefer interpretive rules that allow courts to fill in contractual gaps based on extrinsic evidence such as industry custom, unexecuted drafts, and other indications of the parties' understanding of their obligations under the contract. At least in some instances, the use of this ex post evidence may be more cost effective relative to the ex ante investments that would be necessary to draft more complete contracts. To explore this problem, this Article adapts the framework used to predict vertical integration in the New Institutional Economics literature to identify the variables that are likely to affect the ability to draft complete contracts. This adapted model argues that the frequency and uncertainty of a transaction are the key variables that will determine the amount that parties are likely to invest in filling contractual gaps. The predictions generated by this model help to explain why some transactors, such as the grain, cotton, and diamond merchants studied by Lisa Bernstein, have strong preferences for formal interpretation. The model also suggests why industries that involve infrequent and uncertain transactions-such as construction, tailored software, and the market for mergers and acquisitions-do not share the preference for formal interpretation advocated and observed by the New Formalists. t Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law, University of Chicago Law School. I thank Bob Cooter, Mel Eisenberg, Rob MacCoun, and Oliver Williamson for valuable comments. All errors are my own. HeinOnline -6 Berkeley Bus. L.J. 1 2009 Berkeley Business Law Journal Vol. 6.1, 2009 TABLE OF CONTENTS