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Transition systems for designing and reasoning about norms

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Abstract

The design and analysis of norms is a somewhat neglected topic in AI and Law, but this is not so in other areas of Computer Science. In recent years powerful techniques to model and analyse norms have been developed in the Multi-Agent Systems community, driven both by the practical need to regulate electronic institutions and open agent systems, and by a theoretical interest in mechanism design and normative systems. Agent based techniques often rely heavily on enforcing norms using the software to prevent violation, but I will also discuss the use of sanctions and rewards, and the conditions under which compliance by autonomous agents (including humans) can be expected or encouraged without sanctions or rewards. In the course of the paper a suggested framework for the exploration of these issues is developed.

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Notes

  1. I once encountered a cafe in Paris with three areas: smoking, non-smoking and mixed, but I think this was a joke on the part of the patron.

  2. At the time of writing it had received only nine citations on Google Scholar.

  3. Awarded best paper prize at AAMAS-2011.

  4. Social conventions are an exception, although one’s peers will soon make one aware of transgressions. Books of etiquette are published which are initially intended to describe existing social norms, but may, if sufficiently accepted, become authoritative sources, such as Nancy Mitford’s essay about word usage The English Aristocracy published in Encounter magazine 1954.

  5. One type of transition system, introduced in Hoek et al. (2007), which has joint actions as its transitions is Action-Based Alternating Transition Systems (AATS), adapted from the Alternating Transition Systems used to underpin Alternating-time temporal logic (Alur et al. 2002).

  6. The Regimental Motto of the 17th/21st Lancers, now part of the Queen’s Royal Lancers.

  7. A saying apparently widely used in the US Marines Corps.

  8. It has been argued that removing the possibility of violation means that we are no longer really dealing with norms at all (e.g. Jones and Sergot 1992; Governatori 2015) None the less it is very common in MAS and needs to be discussed here.

  9. Like Atkinson and Bench-Capon (2007), this paper does not consider accrual when multiple values are promoted or demoted by an action, not differing degrees of promotion and demotion. These issues are important, but require further investigation.

  10. Moreover, non-performance of obligations is harder to specify and to detect, see, e.g., Wyner (2006) Sometimes, however, this will depend on the formulation of the action: forbidding tax evasion and insisting on payment of taxes require the same action. Here, however, the obligation will be preferred because there is only one way of paying and many ways of evading. In general the formulation requiring the fewest transitions to be sanctioned should be chosen.

  11. In fact, whereas (3) is much more common that (4), (5c) is perhaps more common that (5b): this probably reflects that this method of seeking compliance is used when sanctions are difficult or impossible to enforce, and so compliance relies on the free choice of the agents concerned. This is closely related to the point about evidence in Boer (2014).

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  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon

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Correspondence to Trevor J. M. Bench-Capon.

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This is a revised and extended version of a paper presented at Jurix 2014 (Bench-Capon 2014).

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Bench-Capon, T.J.M. Transition systems for designing and reasoning about norms. Artif Intell Law 23, 345–366 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10506-015-9175-9

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