Abstract
Normative organisations use norms to guide and constrain agent behaviour in order to facilitate cooperation. Norms and their associated enforcement strategies are chosen to further organisational goals, but the effect that a norm has upon organisational performance may change over time in a dynamic environment and behaviour that is desirable in one environment may come to be harmful in another. In this paper we seek to answer the question — how can an organisation detect when a norm is no longer supporting its goals? Specifically, how can it monitor the impact of a norm upon its performance? This paper has three contributions: first, we detail a model which relates an organisation’s norms to its performance, second, we propose a mechanism for monitoring the impact of a norm upon that performance using a simulation approach, and finally we describe an implementation of our mechanism.
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Notes
- 1.
Our representation is a simpler version of Andrighetto et al.’s [1]; we do not include norm defender or source since norms are imposed by the organisation and self-enforced by agents themselves.
- 2.
If the agent playing a role changes, then these assumptions may be incorrect — we leave this for future work.
- 3.
Jason internal actions are Java functions that allow agents to perform actions not related to their environment, such as writing to a log file.
- 4.
In a MAS with \(n\) norms, there are potentially \(2^n\) combinations that could be monitored.
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Haynes, C., Miles, S., Luck, M. (2014). Monitoring the Impact of Norms upon Organisational Performance: A Simulation Approach. In: Balke, T., Dignum, F., van Riemsdijk, M., Chopra, A. (eds) Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, and Norms in Agent Systems IX. COIN 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8386. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-07314-9_6
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