Productivity is the key indicator of the performance of organizations at each level, which is considered a mental concept. By changing the patterns of thought, one could hope to improve productivity and change individual and organizational performance. A closer look at what common values, attitudes, norms, and beliefs among members of the organization will make everyone consistently work toward...

This paper examines the decentralized recognition of groups within a multiagent normative society. In this work we explore different mechanisms that allow agents to recognize the others as members of a certain social group. Considering as the basic mechanism the one that makes agents interact with other agents without considering the previous interactions and with no communication, three new al...

Abstract—Sustaining cooperation among self-interested agents is critical for the proliferation of emerging online social communities, such as online communities formed through social networking services. Providing incentives for cooperation in social communities is particularly challenging because of their unique features: a large population of anonymous agents interacting infrequently, having ...

Sustaining cooperation among self-interested agents is critical for the proliferation of emerging networked communities, such as the communities formed by social networking services. Providing incentives for cooperation in networked communities is particularly challenging because of their unique features: a large population of anonymous agents interacting infrequently, having asymmetric interes...

With a burgeoning world population, expansions in medical intervention, and intensifi ed agriculture, the need for antibiotic stewardship is increasingly clear. Declining effi cacy of antimicrobial prophylaxis for surgery or chemotherapy, and emergence of pan-resistant pathogens, warn of a post-antibiotic era. In the evolutionary arms race of antimicrobial resistance, rejuvenating the neglected...

Social norms are patterns of behavior that are self-enforcing at the group level: everyone wants to conform when they expect everyone else to conform. There are multiple mechanisms that sustain social norms, including a desire to coordinate, fear of being sanctioned, signaling membership in the group, or simply following the lead of others. This article shows how stochastic evolutionary game th...

In this paper we present concepts and their relations that are necessary for mod-eling autonomous agents in an environment that is governed by some (social) norms. We divide the norms over three levels: the private level the contract level and the convention level. We show how deontic logic can be used to model the concepts and how the theory of speech acts can be used to model the generation o...

It may seem odd to bring up the topic of religious belief in connection with sociology in any way other than to examine examples of specific norms advocated by particular religious traditions. But that is exactly what I intend to do here. My title should be taken in the broadest possible sense. It means to raise the question of how, in general, religious beliefs impact our concepts of social no...

This article identifies four factors for consideration in norms-based research to enhance the predictive ability of theoretical models. First, it makes the distinction between perceived and collective norms and between descriptive and injunctive norms. Second, the article addresses the role of important moderators in the relationship between descriptive norms and behaviors, including outcome ex...