A Game Theoretic Approach to Norms and Agents

In recent years, multi-agent systems have become one of the most promising approaches for organizing software. However, the demand for capabilities of autonomous decision making poses some requirements on agent architectures. It is necessary, in fact, that the behavior of an agent be suitably constrained to make it socially compatible with the community of agents. In this paper, we propose a model for obligations and rules which is inspired to E. Goffman’s work in sociology, and which can be integrated in existing BDI (Belief, Desire, Intention) agent architectures. We show that Decision Theory and Anticipatory Coordination can be the basic building blocks for an agent model where obligations are associated with sanctions (and with another agent, the normative agent, who takes care of making the obligation respected). Anticipatory Coordination is required to foresee the normative agent reactions, while Decision Theory enables an agent to choose in a rational way the most promising line of action.