Abstract
We investigate the concept of artificial societies and identify a number of separate classes of such societies. These are compared in terms of openness, flexibility, stability, and trustfulness. The two most obvious types of artificial societies are the open societies, where there are no restrictions for joining the society, and the closed societies, where it is impossible for an “external agent” to join the society. We argue that whereas open societies supports openness and flexibility, closed societies support stability and trustfulness. In many situations, however, there is a need for societies that support all these aspects, e.g., in systems characterized as information ecosystems. We therefore suggest two classes of societies that better balance the trade-off between these aspects. The first class is the semi-open societies, where any agent can join the society given that it follows some well-specified restrictions (or, at least, promises to do so), and second is the semi-closed societies, where anyone may have an agent but where the agents are of a predefined type.
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Davidsson, P. (2001). Categories of Artificial Societies. In: Omicini, A., Petta, P., Tolksdorf, R. (eds) Engineering Societies in the Agents World II. ESAW 2001. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 2203. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45584-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45584-1_1
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