An institution typically comprises constitutive rules, which give shape and meaning to social interactions and regulative rules, which prescribe agent behaviour in the society. Regulative rules guide social interaction, in particular when they are coupled with reward and punishment regulations that are enforced for (non-)compliance. Institution examples include legislation and contracts. Formal institutional reasoning frameworks automate ascribing social meaning to agent interaction and determining whether those actions have social meanings that comprise (non-)compliant behaviour. Yet, institutions do not just govern societies. Rather, in what is called multi-level governance, institutional designs at lower governance levels (e.g., national legislation at the national level) are governed by higher level institutions (e.g., directives, human rights charters and supranational agreements). When an institution design is found to be non-compliant, punishments can be issued by annulling the legislation or imposing fines on the responsible designers (i.e., government). In order to enforce multi-level governance, higher governance levels (e.g., courts applying human rights) must check lower level institution designs (e.g., national legislation) for compliance; in order to avoid punishment, lower governance levels (e.g., national governments) must check their institution designs are compliant with higher-level institutions before enactment. However, checking non-compliance of institution designs in multi-level governance is non-trivial. In particular, because institutions in multi-level governance operate at different levels of abstraction. Lower level institutions govern with concrete regulations whilst higher level institutions typically comprise increasingly vague and abstract regulations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a formal framework with a novel semantics that defines compliance between concrete lower level institutions and abstract higher level institutions. The formal framework is complemented by a sound and complete computational framework that automates compliance checking, which we apply to a real-world case study. ... Read more

Institutions governing multi-agent systems (MASs) are a pervasive means to guide agents towards the aims of the MAS (e.g. collecting data) with regulations on the outcomes of agents’ behaviour. Yet, wider organisations/governments often intend to guide the design of institutions governing MAS in meeting different aims (e.g. preserving the rights of agents). A pervasive means to guide the design of MAS-governing institutions (or any institution, for that matter) is to use institutions at higher tiers of governance (e.g. directives, constitutions) to regulate the regulations of institutions at lower tiers of governance (e.g. national legislation, software policies). A recent innovation has been an automated means to determine the compliance of a lower-tier institution’s regulations with a higher-tier’s. However, for a designer of a non-compliant institution there remains a dilemma: be punished for non-compliant regulations or arduously determine and rectify the underlying causes of non-compliance. In this paper we propose a way to automatically determine how to revise an institution to be compliant that also minimises the change in the regulations’ outcomes thus keeping as closely as possible to the institution designers’ original intentions. ... Read more

This dissertation is motivated by the need, in today’s globalist world, for a precise way to enable governments, organisations and other regulatory bodies to evaluate the constraints they place on themselves and others. An organisation’s modus operandi is enacting and fulfilling contracts between itself and its participants. Yet, organisational contracts should respect external laws, such as those setting out data privacy rights and liberties. Contracts can only be enacted by following contract law processes, which often require bilateral agreement and consideration. Governments need to legislate whilst understanding today’s context of national and international governance hierarchy where law makers shun isolationism and seek to influence one another. Governments should avoid punishment by respecting constraints from international treaties and human rights charters. Governments can only enact legislation by following their own, pre-existing, law making procedures. In other words, institutions, such as laws and contracts are designed and enacted under constraints. ... Read more