ENGMAS – Understanding Sanction under Variable Observability in a Secure Environment

Norms are a promising basis for governance in secure, collaborative environments---systems in which multiple principals interact. Yet, many aspects of norm-governance remain poorly understood, inhibiting adoption in real-life collaborative systems. This work focuses on the combined effects of sanction and observability of the sanctioner in a secure, collaborative environment. We introduce ENGMAS (Exploratory Norm-Governed MultiAgent Simulation), a multiagent simulation of students performing research within a university lab setting. ENGMAS enables us to explore the combined effects of sanction (group or individual) with the sanctioner's variable observability on system resilience and liveness. The simulation consists of agents maintaining ``compliance" to enforce security norms while also remaining ``motivated" as researchers. The results show with lower observability, agents tend not to comply with security policies and have to leave the organization eventually. Group sanction gives the agents more motive to comply with security policies and is a cost-effective approach comparing to individual sanction in terms of sanction costs.