Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by incomplete information about the costs of providing quality, affect relational contracts in buyer-seller relationships. Under incomplete information, payoffs to actions become private information. This can impede the joint understanding of what constitutes cooperative behavior, and may thus inject mistrust into relationships, even if credibility is held constant. Comparing seller-buyer relationships with and without complete information about seller costs in the laboratory, we find that such a lack of clarity has effects on the terms of relational contracts. However, these effects only concern the distribution of rents, and not efficiency.

This paper describes the research and experiment efforts of the NATO STO group IST-149-RTG capability concept demonstrator for interoperability within unmanned ground systems and C2 and the NAAG team of experts on UGV. The main purpose of the group was to investigate possible standards for controlling UGVs and tests them in a real world scenario. The efforts have been two folded, where the first effort was two NATO groups having an experiment demonstrating interoperability between the UGVs and OCUs available within the group. The Belgium contribution is done in the EU project ICARUS. Both efforts used the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) with the interoperability profile (IOP) to successfully enable interoperability between the systems. The trials showed that it is possible to extend the systems quite easily and achieve compliance with parts of the standard in a relatively short time.

Work and trade relationships are often governed by relational contracts, in which incentives for cooperative action today stem from the prospective future benefits of the relationship. In this paper, we study how reductions in clarity about the financial consequences of actions, induced by incomplete information about the costs of providing quality, affect relational contracts in buyer-seller relationships. Under incomplete information, payoffs to actions become private information. This can impede the joint understanding of what constitutes cooperative behavior, and may thus inject mistrust into relationships, even if credibility is held constant. Comparing seller-buyer relationships with and without complete information about seller costs in the laboratory, we find that such a lack of clarity has effects on the terms of relational contracts. However, these effects only concern the distribution of rents, and not efficiency.

This paper describes the research and experiment efforts of the NATO STO group IST-149-RTG capability concept demonstrator for interoperability within unmanned ground systems and C2 and the NAAG team of experts on UGV. The main purpose of the group was to investigate possible standards for controlling UGVs and tests them in a real world scenario. The efforts have been two folded, where the first effort was two NATO groups having an experiment demonstrating interoperability between the UGVs and OCUs available within the group. The Belgium contribution is done in the EU project ICARUS. Both efforts used the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) with the interoperability profile (IOP) to successfully enable interoperability between the systems. The trials showed that it is possible to extend the systems quite easily and achieve compliance with parts of the standard in a relatively short time.

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