Abstract
The feasibility of open, flexible electronic commerce relies heavily on the effective management of documentary procedures, i.e., the sequence by which (structured) business documents are exchanged among contracting parties. The communication of such documents is not merely the passing of information, but reflects, indeed enacts, the formation and discharge of commitments. Such communications are called performative (versus informative) in that the act of communicating itself is a social action that alters the (contractual, legal, ownership) relationship among the parties.
This paper proposes four tasks for supporting performative aspects of electronic commerce. The first is that performative documents be communicated using cryptographic protocols (including digital signatures) and the involvement of trusted third parties. A special problem is negotiable documents, which may involve the use of chip cards, specialized registries, or both. The second task is the definition of a common, publicly available language for the specification of documentary procedures, which is formal, computable and executable. We propose a formalism, called Documentary Petri Nets, for this purpose. The third task is the definition of standard business scenarios using this representation. This definition might be done on a proprietary basis, or perhaps by industry-wide user groups and/or international bodies such as the ISO (International Standards Organization) and the ICC (International Chamber of Commerce). A CASE (Computer Aided Software Engineering) tool presented in this paper, InterProcs, is designed to support undertaking this latter task by providing both a modeling platform and a testing environment for proposed documentary procedures. The fourth task is development of an architecture and a protocol for sharing these procedures among contracting parties. Three modes are suggested: globally standardized procedures; proprietary procedures; and multi-lateral coordination.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
W.M.P. van der Aalst, Timed coloured Petri nets and their application to logistics, Ph.D. thesis, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1992.
W.M.P. van der Aalst and K. Hee, Workflow management: Models, methods and systems, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2002.
L.E. Allen, Towards a normalized language to clarify the structure of legal discourse, Deontic Logic, Computational Linguistics and Legal Information Systems (A. A. Martino, ed.), vol. II, North-Holland Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 349–407.
John L. Austin, How to do things with words, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, England 1962.
James Baty and Ronald M. Lee, Intershop: Enhancing the vendor/customer dialectic in electronic shopping, Journal of Managment Information Systems (1995).
Roger W.H. Bons, Designing trustworthy trade procedures for open electronic commerce, Ph.D. thesis, EURIDIS at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, September 1997.
H. N. Casteñeda, The logical structure of legal systems: A new perspective, Deontic Logic, Computational Linguistics and Legal Information Systems (L.E. Allen, ed.), vol. II, North-Holland Publishing Company, 1982, pp. 21–37.
K. T. Chen, Schematic evaluation of internal accounting control systems, Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, 1992.
K.T. Chen and Ronald M. Lee, Knowledge-based evaluation of internal accounting control systems — a pattern recognition approach, Proceedings of American Accounting Association Conference (Honolulu, Hawaii), 2003.
S. D. Dewitz, Contracting on a performative network: Using information technology as a legal intermediary, Ph.D. thesis, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 1992.
Sandra D. Dewitz and Ronald M. Lee, Legal procedures as formal conversations: Contracting on a performative network, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Information Systems (Baltimore, Maryland) (Janice I. DeGross, John C. Henderson, and Benn R. Konsynski, eds.), Association for Computing Machinery, December 4–6, 1989, pp. 53–65.
C. F. Flores and J. Ludlow, Doing and speaking in the office, DSS: Issues and Challenges (G. Fick and R. Sprague, eds.), Pergamon Press, London, UK, 1981.
J.A. Fodor, Meaning, convention, and the blue book, Meaning (J.V. Canfield, ed.), Garland Publishing, New York, NY, 1986, pp. 87–108.
ICC, The uniform customs and practices for documentary credit procedures, International Chamber of Commerce publication 500, January 1994, Paris, France.
Steven O. Kimbrough and Ronald M. Lee, On illocutionary logic as a telecommunications language, Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Systems (San Diego, CA), December 1986, pp. 15–25.
Steven O. Kimbrough, Ronald M. Lee, and David N. Ness, Performative, informative and emotive systems: The first piece of the PIE, Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Information Systems (Tucson, AZ) (Leslie Maggie et al., ed.), November 28–30, 1984, pp. 141–148.
Ronald M. Lee and Roger W.H. Bons, Soft-coded trade procedures for openedi, International Journal of Electronic Commerce 1 (1996), no. 1, 27–49.
Ronald M. Lee, Roger W.H. Bons, and René W. Wagenaar., Pattern-directed auditing of inter-organisational trade procedures, Proceedings of the 1st IFIP Conference on eCommerce, eBusiness, and eGovernment (Zurich, Switzerland), 4–5 October 2001.
Ronald M. Lee, CANDID: a logical calculus for describing financial contracts, Ph.D. thesis, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, 1980, Available as WP-80-06-02, Department of Operations and Information Management (née Decision Sciences).
—, Dynamic modeling of documentary procedures: A CASE for EDI, Proceedings of Third International Working Conference on Dynamic Modeling of Information Systems (Noordwijkerhout, The Netherlands) (H. G. Sol, ed.), June 1992, pp. 95–123.
—, INTERPROCS: A Java-based prototyping environment for distributed electronic trade procedures, Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, January 1998, pp. 202–209.
—, Automated generation of electronic procedures: Procedure constraint grammars, Decision Support Systems 33 (2002), no. 3, 291–308.
Erkki Lehtinen and Kalle Lyytinen, Action based model of information systems, Information Systems 11 (1986), no. 4, 299–317.
Ronald M. Lee and George Widmeyer, Shopping in the electronic marketplace, Journal of Management Information Systems 2 (1986), no. 4, 21–35.
K. L. Ong and Ronald M. Lee, An abductive approach to detecting inconsistencies in bureaucratic systems, monograph, Euridis, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1993.
C.A. Petri, Kommunikation mit automaten, Ph.D. thesis, University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany, 1962.
J.L. Peterson, Petri net theory and the modeling of systems, Prentice-Hall, 1981.
Young Ryu and Ronald M. Lee, Formal representation of normative systems: A defeasible deontic reasoning approach, monograph, Euridis, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1993.
John R. Searle, Speech acts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1969.
John R. Searle and Daniel Vanderveken, Foundations of illocutionary logic, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1985.
P.M. Tiersma, The language of offer and acceptance: Speech acts and the question of intent, California Law Review 74 (1986), 189–232.
Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores, Understanding computers and cognition: A new foundation for design, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Reading, Massachusetts, 1 January 1987.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical investigations, third ed., Macmillan, New York, NY, 1953/1958, Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe.
G. H. von Wright, An essay in deontic logic and the general theory of action, Acta Philosophica Fennica Fasc. XXI (1968).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lee, R.M. (2005). Performatives, Performatives Everywhere but Not a Drop of Ink. In: Kimbrough, S.O., Wu, D. (eds) Formal Modelling in Electronic Commerce. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26989-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-26989-4_7
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21431-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-26989-2
eBook Packages: Business and EconomicsBusiness and Management (R0)