Applications where autonomous and heterogeneous agents form opportunistic alliances, which require them to share collective resources to achieve individual objectives, are increasingly common. We model such applications in terms of self-governing institutions for shared resource management. Socio-economic principles for enduring institutions are formalised in a logical framework for dynamic specification of norm-governed systems. The framework is implemented in an experimental testbed to investigate the interplay of coordination in a social dilemma with mutable conventions of an institution. Experimental results show that the presence of conventions enables the norm-governed system to approximate the performance of a theoretically ideal system. We conclude that this approach to self-organisation can provide the foundations for implementing sustainable electronic institutions.
['Jeremy Pitt', 'Julia Schaumeier', 'Alexander Artikis']
Coordination, conventions and the self-organisation of sustainable institutions