Peer Pressure as a Driver of Adaptation in Agent Societies

We consider a resource access control scenario in an open multi-agent system. We specify a mutable set of rules to determine how resource allocation is decided, and minimally assume agent behaviour with respect to these rules is either selfish or responsible. We then study how a combination of learning, reputation, and voting can be used, in the absence of any centralised enforcement mechanism, to ensure that it is more preferable to conform to a system norm than defect against it. This result indicates how it is possible to leverage local adaptation with respect to the Rules of Social-Exchange, Choice, and Order to promote a ‘global’ system property.