Real-valued spectral shift functions for contractions and dissipative operators

In recent joint papers the authors of this note solved a famous problem remained open for many years and proved that for arbitrary contractions with trace class difference there exists an integrable spectral shift function, for which an analogue of the Lifshits--Krein trace formula holds. Similar results were also obtained for pairs of dissipative operators. Note that in contrast with the case of self-adjoint and unitary operators it may happen that there is no {\it real-valued} integrable spectral shift function. In this note we announce results that give sufficient conditions for the existence of an integrable real-valued spectral shift function in the case of pairs of contractions. We also consider the case of pairs of dissipative operators.