Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions

Abstract

We address the problem of engineering self-organizing electronic institutions for resource allocation in open, embedded, and resource-constrained systems. In such systems, there is decentralized control, competition for resources and an expectation of both intentional and unintentional errors. The "optimal" distribution of resources is then less important than the endurance of the distribution mechanism. Under these circumstances, we propose to model resource allocation as a common-pool resource management problem, and develop a formal characterization of Elinor Ostrom's socio-economic principles for self-governing institutions. This article applies a method for sociologically inspired computing to give a complete axiomatization of six of Ostrom's eight principles in the Event Calculus. A testbed is implemented for experimenting with the axiomatization. The experimental results show that these principles support enduring institutions, in terms of longevity and membership, and also provide insight into calibrating the transaction and running costs associated with implementing the principles against the behavioral profile of the institutional membership. We conclude that it is possible to express Ostrom's principles in logical form and that they are necessary and sufficient conditions for enduring self-organizing electronic institutions to manage sustainable common-pool resources.

Social and Asocial Learning in Collective Action Problems: The Rise and Fall of Socially-Beneficial Behaviour

“…Agents take what they desire, and adapt their demand based on what they can get away with appropriating. Here, the early agents learn that they can take as much as they desire, and according to the demand adaptation mechanism (adopted from Pitt et al [1]) soon realise they can appropriate the entire pool. Finally, the first agent adapts to take everything, and all others are left with zero; the Gini coefficient is approaching 1.…”

“…We consider the case when resources are exogenous, i.e., they are provided by the environment over time. An example of this is agents appropriating water for their needs, from a reservoir [1]. The collective task facing the agents is to allocate this resource among them.…”

“…We consider a scenario based on [1], [3] as illustrated in Figure 1. A round starts by agents making their requests, followed by the institution making allocations using a ration rule, and the agents appropriating in a first-come-first-served manner, as determined by their individual compliance.…”

“…Recent work by Pitt et al [1], [2] has shown that, when faced with the problem of sustainable and fair common-pool resource management in (socio-)technical systems, the presence of an electronic institution with the requisite features for sustainability proposed by Ostrom [3] can avoid the freeriding problem. Pitt proposed a computational formalisation of Ostrom's institutional requirements, which may be designed in to the system.…”

Self-organising management of user-generated data and knowledge

“…In EC we formalise these powers as fluents which indicate whether an agent has or had a specific power at a time. Pitt et al (2012) demonstrated that six of Ostrom's principles could be axiomatised for a resource-allocation problem. There are several differences between this problem and our provision and appropriation system.…”