Fulfilling or violating obligations in normative multiagent systems

Abstract

A theory of rational decision making in normative multi-agent systems has to distinguish among the many reasons why agents fulfill or violate obligations. We propose a classification of such reasons for single cognitive agent decision making in a single normative system, based on the increasing complexity of this agent. In the first class we only consider the agent's motivations, in the second class we consider also its abilities, in the third class we consider also its beliefs, and finally we consider also sensing actions to observe the environment. We sketch how the reasons can be formalized in a normative multiagent system with increasingly complex cognitive agents.