Legal Issues in Agents for Electronic Contracting

Intelligent agents are a new emerging technology that allows for machine-to-machine contract formation. Agents equipped with a set of rules instructed by humans, surf the web, discover other agents and/or humans, and take decisions forming agreements in an autonomous way. Despite recent legislations on electronic contracting, there are no legislations governing automatic agent transactions except one preliminary attempt in the USA. In this paper, we are looking into the new legal issues that arise due to intelligent agents in automatic contracting. There are few scattered opinions in the literature and are inadequate to address these issues. So, we present a legal framework to analyze these novel issues and show why even recent legislations cannot adequately address this problem. We identify many of these issues which are rooted at the authorization management in agent delegation. Therefore, we advocate solutions that consider both legal and technical aspects. Based on current legal and business practices, we develop a conceptual model for agent authorization. We propose the use of a Contract Agent Authorization Platform (CAAP) that also supports alerts and acknowledgments, and illustrate the platform with typical use cases. We attempt to investigate the ambiguities of the existing legal framework on contracting agents that emerged due to new technical developments in the field.