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Social Deliberation vs. Social Contracts in Self-governing Voluntary Organisations

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Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XVII (COINE 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 15398))

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Abstract

Self-organising multi-agent systems regulate their components’ behaviour voluntarily, according to a set of socially-constructed, mutually-agreed, and mutable social arrangements. In some systems, these arrangements may be applied with a frequency, at a scale and within implicit cost constraints such that performance becomes a pressing issue. In this context, this paper introduces the Megabike Scenario, which consists of a negotiated agreement on a relatively ‘large’ set of conventional rules and ‘frequent’, ‘democratic’ deliberation and decision-making according to those rules, but a resource-bounded imperative to reach a ‘correct’ decision. A formalism is defined for expressive rule representation combined with efficient and effective rule processing, which is evaluated against five interleaved socio-functional requirements. System performance is also evaluated empirically through simulation. We conclude that to self-organise their social arrangements, agents need some awareness of their own limitations and the value of compromise.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For example, Ober [12] attributes the success of the classical Athenian democracy in outperforming other city-states, despite parity in other metrics, to its superior knowledge management processes which produced ‘better’ decisions more often.

  2. 2.

    https://jacamo-lang.github.io/getting-started.

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful for the constructive comments of three anonymous reviewers, which have improved this article. We also acknowledge the contribution of the Imperial College London Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering SOMAS 23-24 Cohort, who developed the infrastructure used to run the experiments described in Sect. 6. Thanks to Ella Bettison for assistance with that experimentation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Imperial College London, London, UK

    Matthew Scott, Asimina Mertzani, Ciske Smit & Jeremy Pitt

  2. Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Stefan Sarkadi

Authors
  1. Matthew Scott
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  2. Asimina Mertzani
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  3. Ciske Smit
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  4. Stefan Sarkadi
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  5. Jeremy Pitt
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Correspondence to Jeremy Pitt .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

    Stephen Cranefield

  2. IMT Mines Saint-Etienne, Saint‐Étienne, France

    Luis Gustavo Nardin

  3. Ontario Tech University, Ontario, ON, Canada

    Nathan Lloyd

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Scott, M., Mertzani, A., Smit, C., Sarkadi, S., Pitt, J. (2025). Social Deliberation vs. Social Contracts in Self-governing Voluntary Organisations. In: Cranefield, S., Nardin, L.G., Lloyd, N. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms, and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems XVII. COINE 2024. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 15398. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82039-7_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-82039-7_5

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