Incentives in Service Level Agreement establishment the case of economic and social aspects

The Web has changed remarkably over the last years. From sharing data and computational power, these days, a trend towards social networks that allow for recognizing social context can be observed. Social aspects impose new challenges on collaborations over the internet and the affected parties. Currently, in the context of service provisioning over the internet, so called Service Level Agreements (SLAs) enforce the adherence to an agreed level of quality by means of penalties. In the context of social networks, different aspects than just monetary incentives need to be considered when designing penalties. Therefore, this paper investigates on the difference between common economic settings and settings with a social context and finally, requirements on the negotiation of agreements in social networks are derived. Hence, this paper's main contribution is to identify differences between purely economic and socio-economic aspects of agreements and to derive further research directions from the identified gaps. © 2011 IEEE.