Agreeing on Defeasible Commitments

Social commitments are developed for multi-agent systems according to the current practice in law regarding contract formation and breach. Deafeasible commitments are used to provide a useful link between multi-agent systems and legal doctrines. The proposed model makes the commitments more expressive relative to contract law and it stresses the representational rather than the operational side of the commitment life cycle. As a consequence, the broader semantics helps in modeling different types of contracts (gratuitous promises, unilateral contracts, bilateral contracts, and forward contracts) and negotiation patterns. The semantics of higher-order commitments is useful in deciding whether to sign an agreement or not and to represent a larger variety of protocols and legal contracts.

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