Research on negotiation and task allocation has been in the multi-agent systems realm since its inception as a research field. More recently, social aspects of agenthood have received increasing attention, namely developing on the fields of normative and trust systems. The integration of these different research contributions will allow to build robust applications for electronic agreement nego...

An Electronic Institution includes a normative environment with rules and norms for agents’ interoperability, and is also a service providing platform that assists agents in the task of establishing and conducting normative relationships (contracts). Using this platform, agents representing organizations willing to engage in a collective contractual activity select partners according to differe...

This paper addresses two main challenges facing systems neuroscience today: understanding the nature and function of a) cortical feedback between sensory areas and b) correlated variability. Starting from the old idea of perception as probabilistic inference, we show how to use knowledge of the psychophysical task to make easily testable predictions for the impact that feedback signals have on ...

In the current study, we draw on the original job characteristics model (JCM) and on an elaborated model of work design to examine relationships between ethical leadership, task significance, job autonomy, effort, and job performance. We suggest that leaders with strong ethical commitments who regularly demonstrate ethically normative behavior can have an impact on the JCM elements of task sign...

A.N. Prior’s (1960) famous counterexamples to ethical autonomy involve cases where nonnormative premises entail a normative conclusion. Consider, for example, a normative claim N and a non-normative claim M. If N v M is non-normative, then the non-normative ~M & (N v M) entails the normative N. If the disjunction is normative, then it is entailed by the non-normative M. The entailments are impe...

The aim of this study is to determine the word frequency for all thirty letters of the Croatian alphabet and to collect normative data for the letter fluency task in Croatian speakers. Ninety two healthy participants were given each of the Croatian letters, and asked to generate as many words as possible in 60 seconds for each letter Results suggested that participants generated most frequently...

It is argued that the distinction between the normative and the descriptive interpretation of norm sentences can be regarded as a distinction between two kinds of utterances. A norm or a directive has as its content a normative proposition. A normative (performative) utterance of a normative proposition in appropriate circumstances makes the proposition true, and an assertive (descriptive) utte...

Norms have been considered an attractive means for the regulation of the dynamics of multi systems (MAS). Typically, it is left for the individual agents to apply (general) norms to the particular concrete situations that arise during the operation of the system. This paper summarises our work on situated normative infrastructures for multi-agent systems, which aim to facilitate the operational...

Cognitive processes are complex and difficult to study because multiple variables can interact and confound the effect of the independent variable. To avoid this potential problem, experimental conditions are rigorously controlled and normative stimuli from standardized data-sets are preferably used. However, norms characterize the stimuli, but they do not prevent potential confounding effects....