Incentivising Monitoring in Open Normative Systems

We present an approach to incentivising monitoring for norm
violations in open multi-agent systems such as Wikipedia. In
such systems, there is no crisp definition of a norm violation;
rather, it is a matter of judgement whether an agent’s
behaviour conforms to generally accepted standards of behaviour.
Agents may legitimately disagree about borderline
cases. Using ideas from scrip systems and peer prediction,
we show how to design a mechanism that incentivises agents
to monitor each other’s behaviour for norm violations. The
mechanism keeps the probability of undetected violations
(submissions that the majority of the community would consider
not conforming to standards) low, and is robust against
collusion by the monitoring agents.