Distributive and retributive justice in self-organising electronic institutions

Open computing systems, from sensor networks to Smart-Grids, face the same challenge: a set of autonomous, heterogenous agents, needing to collectivise and distribute resources without a centralised decision-making authority. One possible solution is to collectively agree a set of rules for resource provision and appropriation, but there remains the possibility for some agents not to comply with the rules. Therefore, some notion of “trust” with respect to rule compliance is essential. In this talk, we use a notion of trust stemming from analytic philosophy, whereby “trust” is analysed as a belief that there is a rule and an expectation that someone else's behaviour will conform to the rule, underpinned by a reparation mechanism if it does not. In the context of an electronic institution, whose rules are based on Elinor's Ostrom's principles of enduring institutions for common-pool resource management, we consider how this notion of “trust” can be represented by principles of distributive and retributive justice, and we report some experimental results in self-organisation of the “justice system”.