In the Beginning there were n Agents: Founding and Amending a Constitution

TL;DR

This paper models how a community of agents can establish and amend a decision-making constitution starting from simple, intuitive initial agreements and axioms, resulting in a logically derived governance rule.

Contribution

It introduces a framework for deriving a decision rule and its amendment process from basic axioms and initial agreements, providing a clear example of a self-updating constitution.

Findings

A simple initial agreement leads to a well-defined decision rule.

The derived constitution specifies how to amend the decision rule.

The approach offers a logical foundation for self-governing communities.

Abstract

Consider n agents forming an egalitarian, self-governed community. Their first task is to decide on a decision rule to make further decisions. We start from a rather general initial agreement on the decision-making process based upon a set of intuitive and self-evident axioms, as well as simplifying assumptions about the preferences of the agents. From these humble beginnings we derive a decision rule. Crucially, the decision rule also specifies how it can be changed, or amended, and thus acts as a de facto constitution. Our main contribution is in providing an example of an initial agreement that is simple and intuitive, and a constitution that logically follows from it. The naive agreement is on the basic process of decision making - that agents approve or disapprove proposals; that their vote determines either the acceptance or rejection of each proposal; and on the axioms, which are requirements regarding a constitution that engenders a self-updating decision making process.