Linking sanctions to norms in practice

TL;DR

This paper introduces violation modalities in CTL to better model and reason about norms, violations, and obligations in social simulations, enabling more comprehensive normative system implementations.

Contribution

It presents a novel formalization of violation modalities in CTL that links norms, violations, and obligations for improved normative reasoning.

Findings

Violation modalities enable tracking of norm violations.

Deontic operators are integrated with violation modalities.

The formalization guides normative system implementation.

Abstract

Within social simulation, we often want agents to interact both with larger systems of norms, as well as respond to their own and other agents norm violations. However, there are currently no norm specifications that allow us to interact with all of these components. To address this issue, this paper introduces the concept of violation modalities in CTL. These modalities do not only allow us to keep track of violations, but also allow us to define the usual deontic operators. On top of this, they give us a convenient way of linking together various different norms, and allow us to reason about norms with repeated violations and obligations. We will discuss various properties of the modalities and the deontic operators, and will also discuss some ways in which this formalization can guide an implementation of normative systems.