Mapping Abstractions of Norms in Electronic Institutions

Electronic institutions are the agents’ counterpart of human organizations, which are specifically designed for providing support, trust, and legitimacy in electronic commerce applications. Two approaches have been advocated for the design and modeling of multi agent systems in an environment that is governed by some kind of (social) norms: in 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 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 similarity between the two approaches with respect to their use of norms as constraints on the social behavior of multi agents systems.