Some Thoughts about Commitment Protocols (Position Paper)

From the seminal paper by Singh [22], commitment protocols have been raising a lot of attention. The key feature of commitment protocols is their declarative nature, which allows specifying them in a way which abstracts away from any reference to the actual behavior of the agents. By doing so, commitment protocols respect the autonomy of agents. After more than ten years from the introduction of commitments, it is time to ask (i) if a “commitment to do something” is the only kind of regulative norm, that we need in order to give a social semantics to a physical action, and (ii) if they realize what they promised. In this position paper we discuss these points.