Towards a Framework For Handling Disputes In Payment Systems

The ability to support disputes is an important, but often neglected aspect of payment systems. In dealing with dispute support, the first step is to define how to express various dispute claims. In this report, we present a language for expressing dispute claims in a unified manner, independent of any specific payment system. We illustrate how to support claims made in this system-independent language with evidence tokens from an example payment system. We describe an architecture for handling disputes, and present a design for incorporating dispute handling support into SEMPER. Our approach may be generalized to other services where accountability is a require