Social Rules for Agent Systems

When creating (open) agent systems it has become common practice to use social concepts such as social practices, norms and conventions to model the way the interactions between the agents are regulated. However, in the literature most papers concentrate on only one of these aspects at the time. Therefore there is hardly any research on how these social concepts relate. It is also unclear whether something like a norm evolves from a social practice or convention or whether they are complete independent entities. In this paper we investigate some of the conceptual differences between these concepts. Whether they are fundamentally stemming from a single social object or should be seen as different types of objects altogether. And finally, when one should which type of concept in an implementation or a combination of them.