COMPUTATIONAL COST OF VERIFYING ENFORCEABLE CONTRACTS

This paper explores a new method for evaluating the cost of verifying a contract. We relate these costs to the number of computations an alg orithm needs to check that a contract satisfies certain criteria. Two different criteria that facilitate enforcement of the contract are stu died. Our findings indicate bounds on the computational costs as the s ize of the contract grows. If each computation costs the same, then th e marginal cost of increasing the size of the contract is at most line arly increasing and at least constant for the two criteria.