Modeling Norms in Electronic Institutions

Two approaches have been advocated for the design and modeling of (social) norms in multi agent systems: in the coordination strategy, multi agent systems are defined as a set of entities regulated by mechanisms of social order and created by more or less autonomous actors to achieve common goals; in the cooperation strategy, agents model specific roles in the society and interact with each other as means to accomplish their goals. In this paper, we argue that there is a relative duality between the two approaches with respect to their use of norms as constraints on the social behavior of multi agents systems. We present and discuss a variant of an existing framework for modeling multi agent systems in an environment governed by norms for the cooperation strategy.