A Simple Argumentation Based Contract Enforcement Mechanism

Agents may choose to ignore contract violations if the costs of enforcing the contract exceed the compensation they would receive. In this paper we provide an argumentation based framework for agents to both decide whether to enforce a contract, and to undertake contract enforcement actions. The framework centers around the agent reasoning about what arguments to put forth based on a comparison between the utility it would gain for proving its case and the utility it loses for probing environment state.