Coordination, organizations, institutions, and norms in agent systems

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In recent years, the social and organizational aspects of agency have emerged as significant research topics in multi-agent systems (MAS). Applications of MAS in areas like Web services and ubiquitous computing underscore the importance of these aspects for maintaining social order. The openness, heterogeneity, and scalability of MAS introduce new challenges to traditional interaction models, necessitating a closer examination of agent environments and the regulation of interactions. This shift has expanded the understanding of coordination and governance to include not just agent-centric views but also societal and organizational perspectives. Analyzing the social, legal, economic, and technological dimensions of agent organizations and the co-evolution of interactions presents complex interdisciplinary research questions at various abstraction levels. The MAS research community has approached these issues from multiple angles, gradually coalescing around the four key concepts: coordination, organization, institutions, and norms. The COIN workshops aim to unify this subject by bringing together researchers from diverse fields to foster systematic discussions on these themes. This year, the workshops were held during AAMAS 2006 and ECAI 2006, and the papers in this volume are revised selections from those events.