Bounded-Monitor Placement in Normative Environments

ISSN: 16130073 Funding: This work is partially supported by grants from CNPq/Brazil numbers 132339/2016-1 and 305969/2016-1.Publisher PD

Automating decision making to help establish norm-based regulations

Norms have been extensively proposed as coordination mechanisms for both agent and human societies. Nevertheless, choosing the norms to regulate a society is by no means straightforward. The reasons are twofold. First, the norms to choose from may not be independent (i.e, they can be related to each other). Second, different preference criteria may be applied when choosing the norms to enact. This paper advances the state of the art by modeling a series of decision-making problems that regulation authorities confront when choosing the policies to establish. In order to do so, we first identify three different norm relationships -namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability- and we then consider norm representation power, cost, and associated moral values as alternative preference criteria. Thereafter, we show that the decision-making problems faced by policy makers can be encoded as linear programs, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers

Nudging folks towards stronger password choices:providing certainty is the key

Persuading people to choose strong passwords is challenging. One way to influence password strength, as and when people are making the choice, is to tweak the choice architecture to encourage stronger choice. A variety of choice architecture manipulations i.e. “nudges”, have been trialled by researchers with a view to strengthening the overall password profile. None has made much of a difference so far. Here we report on our design of an influential behavioural intervention tailored to the password choice context: a hybrid nudge that significantly prompted stronger passwords.We carried out three longitudinal studies to analyse the efficacy of a range of “nudges” by manipulating the password choice architecture of an actual university web application. The first and second studies tested the efficacy of several simple visual framing “nudges”. Password strength did not budge. The third study tested expiration dates directly linked to password strength. This manipulation delivered a positive result: significantly longer and stronger passwords. Our main conclusion was that the final successful nudge provided participants with absolute certainty as to the benefit of a stronger password, and that it was this certainty that made the difference

MIRANA: a socio-ecological model for assessing sustainability of community-based regulations

The Malagasy local communities managing forest resources have difficulties in assessing the impacts of the management plans they decide upon. To help them, we have designed an integrated model with the ecological processes, the various regulations (zoning, quota, etc..) and the resulting inhabitants behavior in order to explore the impacts of scenarios. The model MIRANA has been designed using the MIMOSA framework in which one must design a conceptual model using ontologies, annotate the conceptual model with the necessary processes, and design a concrete model from which to generate the simulation model. In MIRANA, the conceptual model is made of the set of ontologies describing the actors of the system (households, communities, etc.), the objects they are acting on (lands, animal and vegetal species, etc.), the actions carried out by the actors on the objects (hunting, cultivation, etc.) and the regulations on the actions. The actors are provided with needs (food, money, etc.) or objectives (conservation, production, etc.) and planning mechanisms. The objects are provided with spontaneous processes (fertility dynamics, growth of biomass, etc.). This paper is focused on the representation and use of a multiplicity of normative structures for the regulation of the interactions with the environmen

Implementing Norms that Govern Non-Dialogical Actions

The governance of open multi-agent systems is particular important since those systems are composed by heterogeneous, autonomous and independently designed agents. Such governance is usually provided by the establishment of norms that regulate the actions of agents. Although there are several approaches that formally describe norms, there are still few of them that propose their implementation. In additions, only one that provides support for implementing norms deals with non-dialogical actions since the others only deal with dialogical actions, i.e., actions that provide the interchange of messages between agents. In this paper we propose the implementation of norms that govern non-dialogical actions by extending one of the approaches that regulate dialogical ones. Non-dialogical actions are not related to the interactions between agents but to tasks executed by agents that characterize, for instance, the access to resources, their commitment to play roles or their movement into environments and organizations

Constraint rule-based programming of norms for electronic institutions

Peer reviewedPostprin

Obligation Norm Identification in Agent Societies

Most works on norms have investigated how norms are regulated using institutional mechanisms. Very few works have focused on how an agent may infer the norms of a society without the norm being explicitly given to the agent. This paper describes a mechanism for identifying one type of norm, an obligation norm. The Obligation Norm Inference (ONI) algorithm described in this paper makes use of an association rule mining approach to identify obligation norms. Using agent based simulation of a virtual restaurant we demonstrate how an agent can identify the tipping norm. The experiments that we have conducted demonstrate that an agent in the system is able to add, remove and modify norms dynamically. An agent can also flexibly modify the parameters of the system based on whether it is successful in identifying a norm.Norms, Social Norms, Obligations, Norm Identification, Agent-Based Simulation, Simulation of Norms, Artificial Societies, Normative Multi-Agent Systems (NorMAS)