Automating Decision Making to Help Establish Norm-Based Regulations

Abstract

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. On the one hand, this paper considers norm representation power and cost as alternative preference criteria. On the other hand, it identifies three different norm relationships --namely, generalisation, exclusivity, and substitutability. We show that the decisionmaking problem faced by policy makers can be encoded as a linear program, and hence solved with the aid of state-of-the-art solvers.