Norm Emergence in Regulatory Compliance

A trend in regulatory compliance is to issue 'open norms': norms which leave room for contextual interpretation about their implementation. Subjects must demonstrate to the regulator how they have interpreted the norms and collect evidence to show that the implementation is operationally effective. Subjects communicate frequently about the interpretation of open norms and copy compliance behaviour of others. We view this social norm interpretation process as a form of norm emergence. We have performed a case study of adoption of AEO (Authorized Economic Operator) legislation in the EU customs domain. We make two observations: (1) norm adoption is guided in a top-down fashion, by EU guidelines and auditing standards, (2) consensus about what counts as acceptable is reached by interaction among companies, consultants, and auditors. In this paper we review of some literature about norm emergence in the multi agent systems field, which can explain these observations. It turns out that we need to combine two kinds of theories: (i) theories about the specification, prescription and implementation of norms (one-to-many, top-down), and (ii) theories about norm adoption, consensus reaching and norm distribution (many-to-many, bottom-up).1