Electronic Contract Drafting Based on Risk and Trust Assessment
Yao-Hua Tan and Walter Thoen
International Journal of Electronic Commerce,
Volume 7, Number 4, Summer 2003, pp. 55.
Abstract: Contracts protect the parties involved in a commercial transaction, but the negotiating and drafting processes are often so unstructured that the parties cannot be certain that their interests are indeed secured. This paper proposes a structured, model-driven approach to contracting that each party to a contract can use to assess the personal risk and trust it entails and decide whether it adequately protects their interests. If it does not, the model can support negotiations to amend the contract. The risk/trust model is based on the authors’ earlier research on a generic model of trust for use in developing trust services for e-commerce.
Key Words and Phrases: B2B e-commerce, electronic contracts, negotiation, trust.