Multi-agent systems Computational Trust Normative Control Betrayal Despite relevant insights from socio-economics, little research in multi-agent systems has addressed the interconnections between trust and normative notions such as contracts and sanctions. Focusing our attention on scenarios of betrayal, in this paper we combine the use of trust and sanctions in a negotiation process. We desc...

For over a decade, agent research has shown that social commitments support the definition of open multiagent systems by capturing the responsibilities that agents contract toward one another through their communications. These systems, however, rely on the assumption that agents respect the social commitments they adopt. To overcome this limitation, in this paper we investigate the role of san...

Third-party punishment has recently received attention as an explanation for human altruism. Feelings of anger in response to norm violations are assumed to motivate third-party sanctions, yet there is only sparse and indirect support for this idea. We investigated the impact of both anger and guilt feelings on third-party sanctions. In two studies both emotions were independently manipulated. ...

In this article we incorporate notions of the fairness of sanctions into the standard model of public enforcement. When both the probability and magnitude of sanctions may be varied, the usual solution involves a very high sanction and a relatively low probability of enforcement if individuals are risk neutral. When the issue of fairness is added to the analysis, the optimal sanction generally ...