Madrideo, Paul F.

Norm-based mechanism design

Nils Bulling , Mehdi Dastani

Abstract
The increasing presence of autonomous (software) systems in open environments in general, and the
complex interactions taking place among them in particular, require flexible control and coordination
mechanisms to guarantee desirable overall system level properties without limiting the autonomy of the
involved systems. In artificial intelligence, and in particular in the multi-agent systems research field, social
laws, norms, and sanctions have been widely proposed as flexible means for coordinating the behaviour of
autonomous agents in multi-agent settings. Recently, many languages have been proposed to specify and
implement norm-based environments where the behaviour of autonomous agents is monitored, evaluated
based on norms, and possibly sanctioned if norms are violated. In this paper, we first introduce a formal
setting of multi-agent environments based on concurrent game structures which abstracts from concrete
specification languages. We extend this formal setting with norms and sanctions, and show how concepts
from mechanism design can be used to formally analyse and verify whether a specific behaviour can be
enforced (or implemented) if agents follow their subjective preferences. We relate concepts from mechanism
design to our setting, where agents preferences are modelled by linear time temporal logic (LTL) formulae.
This proposal bridges the gap between norms and mechanism design allowing us to formally study and
analyse the effect of norms and sanctions on the behaviour of rational agents. The proposed machinery can
be used to check whether specific norms and sanctions have the designers expected effect on the rational
agents behaviour or if a set of norms and sanctions that realise the effect exists at all. We investigate the
computational complexity of our framework, focusing on its implementation in Nash equilibria and we show
that it is located at the second and third level of the polynomial hierarchy. Despite this high complexity, on
the positive side, these results are in line with existing complexity results of related problems. Finally, we
propose a concrete executable specification language that can be used to implement multiagent
environments. We show that the proposed specification language generates specific concurrent game
structures and that the abstract multi-agent environment setting can be applied to study and analyse the
behaviour of multi-agent programs with and without norms.

Source: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0004370216300789?via%3Dihub