Implementing responsibility for states and events

Contracts in the real world often rest upon a notion of responsibility, by which parties commit to the fulfilment of particular imperatives embedded in the contract. Responsibility is not the same as direct action, nor commitment to such action: a canonical example is where imperatives are issued, in a particular context, to effect the delegation of responsibility. Furthermore, responsibility can range not only over particular activities, but also over particular states of the world. This paper first explains the problem of state-based and event-based responsibility, and then illustrates how this is operationalised in the NoA system through the use of an example.