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The Emergence of Norms via Contextual Agreements in Open Societies

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Advances in Social Computing and Multiagent Systems (MFSC 2015)

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Abstract

This paper explores the emergence of norms in agents’ societies when agents play multiple - even incompatible - roles in their social contexts simultaneously, and have limited interaction ranges. Specifically, this article proposes two reinforcement learning methods for agents to compute agreements on strategies for using common resources to perform joint tasks. The computation of norms by considering agents’ playing multiple roles in their social contexts has not been studied before. To make the problem even more realistic for open societies, we do not assume that agents share knowledge on their common resources. So, they have to compute semantic agreements towards performing their joint actions.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Of course agents may specify periods using different time granularities, different forms of representing time, etc. In this paper we assume that there is a specific granularity for specifying periods and thus agents just have to align their specifications: Otherwise, further agreements are necessary.

  2. 2.

    It must be pointed out that since the neighborhood of any agent includes itself, and its social context includes its own roles, it may also hold that \(i=j\).

  3. 3.

    the notation (\(\cdot \textit{:m}\)) means “any agent playing the role \(R_m\)”.

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Acknowledgement

The publication of this article has been partially supported by the University of Piraeus Research Center.

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Correspondence to George A. Vouros .

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Vouros, G.A. (2015). The Emergence of Norms via Contextual Agreements in Open Societies. In: Koch, F., Guttmann, C., Busquets, D. (eds) Advances in Social Computing and Multiagent Systems. MFSC 2015. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 541. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24804-2_12

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24804-2_12

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