Role model based mechanism for norm emergence in artificial agent societies

Abstract

In this paper we propose a mechanism for norm emergence based on role models. The mechanism uses the concept of normative advice whereby the role models provide advice to the follower agents. Our mechanism is built using two layers of networks, the social link layer and the leadership layer. The social link network represents how agents are connected to each other. The leadership network represents the network that is formed based on the role played by each agent on the social link network. The two kinds of roles are leaders and followers. We present our findings on how norms emerge on the leadership network when the topology of the social link network changes. The three kinds of social link networks that we have experimented with are fully connected networks, random networks and scale-free networks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.