Abstract
An important application of intelligent agents on the World Wide Web is to support Business to Business (B2B) e-commerce, such as, virtual enterprises. A virtual enterprise can be described as a temporary alliance of enterprises that come together to share skills or core competencies and re sources in order to better respond to business opportunities, and whose coop eration is supported by computer networks. In order to ensure sound collab oration, it is important that the actors involved, as well as the software repre senting the actors such as intelligent agents, act according to the explicit and implicit rules, or norms, that the participating enterprises have agreed upon. The purpose of this article is to explore how norm-governed behavior can be achieved in the context of virtual enterprises. We analyse a number of formal models of both artificial societies and normative systems, and compare and try to align them with a formal model of agent-supported virtual enterprises. A general observation is that the models analysed are not concordant with each other and therefore require further alignment. It is concluded that the in troduction of different types of norms on different levels can support sound collaboration in virtual enterprises. Moreover, the deployment of norm de fender and promoter functionality is argued to ensure norm compliance and impose punishments of norm violations. Finally, a number of additions that may enrich the norm-focused models are suggested.
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Davidsson, P., Jacobsson, A. (2009). Towards Norm-Governed Behavior in Virtual Enterprises. In: Nguyen, N.T., Jain, L.C. (eds) Intelligent Agents in the Evolution of Web and Applications. Studies in Computational Intelligence, vol 167. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88071-4_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-88071-4_3
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