The current trend towards dynamic and highly scalable service provisioning fosters the rise of Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms and so called Compute Clouds. The on-demand provisioning of services gains more and more influence.  For offering enriched services that are capable of performing complex tasks, the dynamic composition of such services becomes important. In order to enable the collaboration between different service providers, technical and economic preliminaries have to be made. This work covers economic considerations from the viewpoint of a service provider. Therefore, the concept of Service Value Networks is presented and an agreement network as underlying legal structure is illustrated. Finally, an approach that enables a service provider to select the risk-minimal combination of contracts is elaborated and discussed.

The authors present a comprehensive framework for modeling SVNs, i.e. the entities in such a network and how they collaborate in order to provide a complex business service. Based on this framework and building on work from finance about portfolio selection, we develop a model for the risk-based selection of contractual partners in SVNs. The applicability of this model is illustrated by means of a numerical example.