On the potential of norm-governed behavior in different categories of artificial societies

Based on a classification of artificial societies and the identification of four different types of stakeholders in such societies, we investigate the potential of norm-governed behavior in different types of artificial societies. The basis of the analysis is the preferences of the stakeholders and how they influence the state of the society. A general conclusion drawn is that the more open a society is the more it has to rely on agent owners and designers to achieve norm-governed behavior, whereas in more closed societies the environment designers and owners may control the degree of norm-governed behavior. Paul Davidsson is professor at the Department of Systems and Software Engineering, School of Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1996 from Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include the theory and application of multi-agent systems, autonomous agents, and machine learning. Application areas include logistics, transport systems, district heating systems, building automation, and telecommunications systems. The results of this work have been reported in more than 75 peer-reviewed scientific articles published in international journals and conference proceedings. Moreover, he has been the co-editor of three books on Multi Agent Based Simulation and member of program committees of numerous international conferences, such as the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Stefan Johansson is an assistant professor at Department of Systems and Software Engineering, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Sweden, where he also finished his PhD in 2002. The main research areas cover coordination issues in multi-agent systems and theories of autonomous agents. Applications of special interests are agents in game ai, robotics, telecommunication networks. On his list of publications are more than 35 peer-reviewed papers published in conference proceedings and scientific journals in the areas of agents, ai, robotics and games. He has also been a member of a variety of programme committees of scientific conferences, including e.g. Intelligent Agent Technology.