The Principled Violation of Policy: Norm Flexibilization in Open Self-Organising Systems

摘要

Open systems are often submitted to rules and norms in an attempt to guarantee its well functioning and prevent selfish (e.g. free-riding) or unsustainable (e.g. tragedy of the commons) behaviour. Associated to the norms, there is usually also a sanctioning structure responsible to prevent and punish non-compliance enforcing conformity. Without disregarding the importance of these structures, we investigate to what extent sanctioning strategies really have beneficial effects in sociotechnical systems and in what extent full norm compliance is a desirable outcome. By considering open system scenarios that include cost of monitoring, diversity and subjectivity of behaviour, norms relaxation and unfair environments, we investigate the hypothesis that a flexible system capable to violate its norms and sanctions can be more appropriate and efficient than strict norm-enforcing. We then propose and examine experiments of common-pool resource management that show how strategies of partial sanction application may enable the obtaining of solutions that are cheaper, resilient to accidental misbehaviour, congruent to diversity of behaviour and adaptable in cases with divergent notions of fairness.