Norm Emergence in Multi-Agent Societies

Norms are shared expectations of behaviours that exist in human societies. Norms help societies by increasing the predictability of individual behaviours and by improving cooperation and collaboration among members. Norms have been of interest to multi-agent system researchers, as software agents intend to follow certain norms. But, owing to their autonomy, agents sometimes violate norms, which needs monitoring. In order to build robust MAS that are norm compliant and systems that evolve and adapt norms dynamically, the study of norms is crucial. Our objective in this chapter is to propose a mechanism for norm emergence in artificial agent societies and provide experimental results. We also study the role of autonomy and visibility threshold of an agent in the context of norm emergence.