Social Deliberation vs. Social Contracts in Self-Governing Voluntary Organisations
Matthew Scott, Asimina Mertzani, Ciske Smit, Stefan Sarkadi, Jeremy Pitt
TL;DR
The paper investigates how self-governing multi-agent systems can balance deliberative governance with social contracts in a resource-constrained environment using the Megabike Scenario. It introduces a matrix-based rule representation and analyzes the approach against five socio-functional criteria, supported by empirical Megabike simulations. Results indicate substantial reductions in computational burden and improved survivability when employing mutable social contracts, especially under resource scarcity. The work highlights the need for agents to be aware of their cognitive limits and to embrace compromise, offering a practical alternative to heavy deliberation without sacrificing outcome quality.
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.