Formalizing a Language for Institutions and Norms

One source of trust for physical trading systems is their physical assets and simply their presence. A similar baseline does not exist for electronic trading systems, but one way in which it may be possible to create that initial trust is through the abstract notion of an institution, defined in terms of norms [19] and the scenes within which (software) agents may play roles in different trading activities, governed by those norms. We present here a case for institutions in electronic trading, a specification language for institutions (covering norms, performative structure, scenes, roles, etc.) and its semantics and how this may be mapped into formal languages such as process algebra and various forms of logic, so that there is a framework within which norms can be stated and proven.