Interactional Justice and Self-Governance of Open Self-Organising Systems

We investigate a formal characterisation of interactional justice asa mechanism for self-organisation of institutional rules in an open system, in order to address issues of congruence, acceptability and risk. The process of interactional justice uses opinion formation over a social network with respect to a shared set of congruent values, to transform a set of individual, subjective self-assessments into a collective, relative, aggregated assessment. A negative collective assessment can provide a stimulus for self-organisedreformation of the rules of, or the appointments to roles in, the institution. We describe the implementation of a multi-agent simulator, and report resultsof experiments which show how interactional justice performs in different contexts:firstly in an economy of scarcity, and secondly in the presence of self-interested cliques. We conclude thatinteractional justice makes three important contributions to 'good' self-governance:in managing knowledge, increasing stability, and reducing conflict.