Good faith in contract negotiation and performance

International Journal of Business Process Integration and Management

Volumn 4, Issue 3, 2009, Pages 154-173

  Rotolo, Antonino ^a   Sartor, Giovanni ^a,b   Smith, Clara ^c  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BOLOGNA   (Italy)

^b EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY INSTITUTE   (Italy)

^c UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL DE LA PLATA   (Argentina)

Author keywords

defeasible logic; DL; e contracts; good faith; MAS; multimodal logic; trust

Indexed keywords

EID: 84871529947     PISSN: 17418763     EISSN: 17418771     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1504/IJBPIM.2009.030983     Document Type: Article

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50. Article 1175 of the Italian Civil Code states that ‘debtor and creditor must behave themselves following the rules of correctness’. Article 1366 provides that ‘the contract must be interpreted in good faith’. Article 1375 establishes that ‘the contract must be performed in good faith’. Article 1198 of the Argentinean Civil Code provides that ‘contracts must be formed, interpreted and performed in good faith, and in accordance to what parties truly understood or may have understood, behaving carefully and with prevention’.
51. Article 2 inc. 2 of the Charter provides that ‘all Members, in order to ensure to all of them the rights and benefits resulting from membership, shall fulfil in good faith the obligations assumed by them in accordance with the present Charter’.
52. Article 1:201 settles that ‘each party to a contract must act in accordance with good faith and fair dealing’.
53. Good faith dealing, Article 172 of the Argentinean Civil Code; good faith parties to a marriage, Article 221 ACC; good faith possessor, Article 552 ACC; good faith debtor, Article 800 ACC; good faith possessor, Article 1147 of the Italian Civil Cod; etc.
54. Following this case, we may argue that deception and violation of objective good faith standards require to focus also on the mental states of the agents. In particular, it seems important that Hamlet knows that the drawing is by Degas and that he omits to inform Ophelia about this, namely, that he refrains from ensuring that she, too, believes that the painting is of great value. Indeed, this is true and these aspects constitute a part of the background. However, in the perspective of objective good faith, detection of objective deception has to consider only external behaviours. In this sense, precontractual and contractual monitoring, according specifically to objective good faith, do not see mental states as essential.
55. Article 1218: ‘the debtor who does not exactly render due performance is liable for damages […]’.
56. Article 505: ‘the effects of obligations with regard to the creditor are: […] 3rd: to obtain from the debtor the corresponding compensation’.
57. ‘Good faith possessor is the one who possesses ignoring s/he is damaging other’s rights. [.] Good faith is presumed, and it suffices, it is present at the time of acquisition’.
58. Article 2356 of the Argentinean Civil Code states that ‘there is good faith possession when the possessor, due to ignorance or due to a factual error, is persuaded of its legitimacy’.
59. Additional motivations are provided in Section 4.4, where we discuss good faith presumptions.
60. Given a derivation P, in the remainder, P(1..n) will denote the initial part of the derivation of length n.
61. Since rules for KNOW permit to derive only plain literals, the problem of conflicts here amounts to detecting the potential derivation of p and ∼ p.
62. We are considering in our example that f4 generates Ophelia’s reliance. According to Castelfranchi and Falcone (2001), what contributes to the generation of what we informally call here the trust atmosphere are assessments expressing that Ophelia believes in that Hamlet has the practical possibility of selling the drawing, that he also has the ability to sell the drawing, that she also prefers Hamlet to sell the drawing rather than selling it herself, that she also believes that Hamlet will persist on trying to achieve the sale, et cetera. Of course, the analysis of all these aspects deserves a detailed technical work which includes connections among dynamic logic and our action and deontic logic, issues that clearly cannot be addressed here.