Regulating agent involvement in inter-enterprise electronic commerce

Current research on electronic commerce focuses mainly on fair and efficient transfer of money and goods between a client and a vendor. Inter-enterprise electronic commerce, though, bestows a more complex setting on the trade by adding a new dimension to the individual-merchant frame. The parties involved in a purchase are no longer autonomous entities, but are members of an organization whose rules of doing business they have to obey. We propose a flexible approach towards regulating agent involvement in inter-enterprise electronic commerce. The method is based on the concept of law-governed interaction (LGI) which makes a strict separation between a declarative, formal statement of a policy and its enforcement