Contextualized institutions in virtual organizations

Abstract

Within a virtual organization, more than one institution might be involved in the regulation of actors' behavior. Each institution specifies a set of norms covering a specific aspect of the problem domain with a governance scope defining its remit. Together, they govern the participants and reflect the objectives of the organization. With actors' behavior being simultaneously regulated by more than one institution, normative conflicts can appear. In this paper, we formalize the notion of governance scope and propose a computational approach to identify weak and strong norm conflicts in virtual organizations. This is achieved by explicitly modeling the governance scopes of institutions through context models. We illustrate our approach by means of a case study concerning food security in international trade. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.