Local Norm Phenomena in Multi-Agent Systems under Community Networks

This paper investigates how local norm emergence, other than conventional global norm emergence, helps to achieve coordination among agents in multi-agent systems. That is, when agents are partitioned into communities, different communities of agents establish different social norms. We provide a definition of local norms and propose two metrics, namely, conformity to local norms and diversity in agents' actions, to characterize the strength and diversity of local norms. The experimental results show that local norm emergence is more commonly found than global norm emergence under networks with significant community structure. In addition, it is also shown that community sizes and link density significantly affect how fast local norms emerge.