17-34 Monitoring interaction in organisations

Abstract

In an organisational setting, such as an online marketplace, the organisation monitors agent interactions, and enforces norms by means of sanctions. This paper provides an operational semantics for agent interactions within such a setting, distinguishing constitutive norms for monitoring and sanction rules for enforcement of norms. Our contribution emphasizes a more detailed exploration of the processes of monitoring commitments created through agent interactions and imposition of sanctions when commitments are violated. We consider both agent-agent and agent-environment interactions, focusing on operationalizing enforcement of commitment-based norms. We provide a generic way to develop operational semantics from specific definitions of norm behaviour. For an example set of norm behaviours, we sketch some formal properties that follow from our semantics, such as continuity, (non-)interference, and (non-)redundancy. © Springer-Verlag 2013.