Social Deliberation vs. Social Contracts in Self-Governing Voluntary Organisations

TL;DR

This paper explores how self-organising multi-agent systems can effectively manage social arrangements through formal rule representation, democratic decision-making, and awareness of limitations, evaluated via simulation in the Megabike Scenario.

Contribution

It introduces the Megabike Scenario, a formalism for representing social rules, and empirically evaluates its effectiveness in self-organising multi-agent systems.

Findings

Effective rule representation improves decision-making.

Awareness of limitations enhances system performance.

Simulation results support the formalism's viability.

Abstract

Self-organising multi-agent systems regulate their components' behaviour voluntarily, according to a set of socially-constructed, mutually-agreed, and mutable social arrangements. In some systems, these arrangements may be applied with a frequency, at a scale and within implicit cost constraints such that performance becomes a pressing issue. This paper introduces the \textit{Megabike Scenario}, which consists of a negotiated agreement on a relatively 'large' set of conventional rules, 'frequent' 'democratic' decision-making according to those rules, and a resource-bounded imperative to reach 'correct' decisions. A formalism is defined for effective rule representation and processing in the scenario, and is evaluated against five interleaved socio-functional requirements. System performance is also evaluated empirically through simulation. We conclude that to self-organise their social arrangements, agents need some awareness of their own limitations and the value of compromise.