Self-organization in decentralized agent societies through social norms

Social norms help people self-organizing in many situations where having an authority representative is not feasible. On the contrary to institutional rules, the responsibility to enforce social norms is not the task of a central authority but a task of each member of the society. “The social norms I am talking about are not the formal, prescriptive or proscriptive rules designed, imposed, and enforced by an exogenous authority through the administration of selective incentives. I rather discuss informal norms that emerge through the decentralized interaction of agents within a collective and are not imposed or designed by an authority”[3]. In recent years, the use of social norms has been considered also as a mechanism to regulate virtual societies and specifically heterogeneous societies formed by humans and artificial agents. One of the main topics of research regarding the use of social norms in virtual societies is how they emerge, that is, how social norms are created at first instance. We divide the emergence of norms into two different stages: (a) how norms appear in the mind of one or several individuals and (b) how these new norms are spread over the society until they become accepted social norms. We are interested in studying the second stage, the spreading and acceptance of social norms, what Axelrod [2] defines as norm support. Our understanding of norm support deals with the problem of which norm is established as the dominant. Specifically, we deal with two different branches of the research on normative sytems: conventional norms and essential norms. As Cite as: Self-Organization in Decentralized Agent Societies through Social Norms (Extended Abstract), Daniel Villatoro, Proc. of 10th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2011), Tumer, Yolum, Sonenberg and Stone (eds.), May, 2–6, 2011, Taipei, Taiwan, pp. 1373-1374. Copyright c © 2011, International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved. described in [6], on the one hand conventional norms fix one norm amongst a set of norms that are equally efficient as long as every member of the population uses the same (e.g. communication protocols, greetings, driving side of the road), and on the other hand, essential norms solve or ease collective action problems, where there is a conflict between the individual and the collective interests. The scientific question of this research is how to accelerate the establishment of a common norm in virtual societies: in the case of conventional norms, by dissolving the subconventions; and in the case of essential norms, by studying the effects of punishment and norm internalization.