On Meta-norms as Use Policies Constraining Contracts and Contract Requirements

Abstract

In multi-agent organizations, contractual obligations and prohibitions are important for governing autonomous agents. However, agents may only wish to participate in an organization if the contracts they engage in respect and satisfy their policies specifying how the agent may be used, we call these use policies and they specify what norms may be imposed on them in a contract and what norms must be imposed on the contractual counter-parties. To address this, we propose a representation of use policies as sets of meta-norms constraining the norms that may be imposed on the agents with use policies. We then consider, given a bilateral contract formed between a client and an agent wishing to enact a role, the properties of a correct contract with respect to the use policy of the role enacting agent. This means we can analyse contract formation processes in the face of use policies.