Social Deliberation vs. Social Contracts in Self-Governing Voluntary Organisations

Abstract

Self-organising multi-agent systems regulate their components' behaviour voluntarily, according to a set of socially-constructed, mutually-agreed, and mutable social arrangements. In some systems, these arrangements may be applied with a frequency, at a scale and within implicit cost constraints such that performance becomes a pressing issue. This paper introduces the \textit{Megabike Scenario}, which consists of a negotiated agreement on a relatively 'large' set of conventional rules, 'frequent' 'democratic' decision-making according to those rules, and a resource-bounded imperative to reach 'correct' decisions. A formalism is defined for effective rule representation and processing in the scenario, and is evaluated against five interleaved socio-functional requirements. System performance is also evaluated empirically through simulation. We conclude that to self-organise their social arrangements, agents need some awareness of their own limitations and the value of compromise.