Role-based Rights in Artificial Social Systems

In this paper we use normative systems to introduce roles and rights in the game-theoretic artificial social systems developed by Shoham and Tennenholtz. We model normative systems as socially constructed agents whose behavior is determined by a set of role playing agents. Roles are again modeled as socially constructed agents, and the rolesý behavior is the ideal behavior of agents playing the roles. In our approach, the strategies of the role correspond to the rights that can be exercised by the role. In other words, rights are powers extending the set of strategies of an agent - not constraining them! - due to the new opportunities to exercise rights. We consider the role assignment problem of how to assign agents to roles such that the role playing agent is expected to behave like the ideal behavior of the role. We also consider how the normative system controls the behavior of agents playing a role in it.