Norm emergency through argumentation

Open societies are situated in dynamic environments and are formed by heterogeneous autonomous agents. In order to ensure social order, norms have been employed as coordination mechanisms. However, the dynamical features of open systems may cause that norms loose their validity and need to be adapted. Therefore, this paper proposes a new dialogue game protocol for modelling the interactions produced between agents that must reach an agreement on the use of norms. An application example has been presented for showing both the performance of the protocol and its usefulness as a mechanism for managing the solving process of a coordination problem through norms.This work was partially supported by CONSOLIDER-INGENIO 2010 under grant CSD2007-00022, by the Spanish government and GVA funds under TIN2006-14630-C0301 and PROMETEO/2008/051 projects and by the FPU grant AP-2007-01256 awarded to N. Criado