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Norms guide multi-agent systems away from being potentially anarchic towards a coordinated and collaborative society. Institutions provide an explicit, external representation of norms as well as the means to detect violations and other conditions. Each institution can be crafted individually to capture their designers' goals, but this creates a challenge at higher levels of authority in guiding the institutional design to be coordinated with other institutions and not imposing unacceptable limits on agents' rights. We propose to use institutions to govern and to revise institutions, following a principle widely encountered in the social world, where treaties, primary legislation, framework agreements and subsidiarity establish a regulatory space by defining norms on the form of a body of regulation. We set out a formal and computational framework, building on the InstAL model and implementation, to construct tiers of institutions, where the norms at each tier are governed by those at the tier above. Thus, agents' behaviour is governed and monitored by a tier-1 institution, whose norms are governed and monitored by a tier-2 institution, etc. This allows us to check the compliance of an institution with the tier above. Compliance failure generates the necessary negative examples for automatic norm-revision.

An institution typically comprises constitutive rules, which give shape and meaning to social interactions and regulative rules, which prescribe agent behaviour in the society. Regulative rules guide social interaction, in particular when they are coupled with reward and punishment regulations that are enforced for (non-)compliance. Institution examples include legislation and contracts. Formal institutional reasoning frameworks automate ascribing social meaning to agent interaction and determining whether those actions have social meanings that comprise (non-)compliant behaviour. Yet, institutions do not just govern societies. Rather, in what is called multi-level governance, institutional designs at lower governance levels (e.g., national legislation at the national level) are governed by higher level institutions (e.g., directives, human rights charters and supranational agreements). When an institution design is found to be non-compliant, punishments can be issued by annulling the legislation or imposing fines on the responsible designers (i.e., government). In order to enforce multi-level governance, higher governance levels (e.g., courts applying human rights) must check lower level institution designs (e.g., national legislation) for compliance; in order to avoid punishment, lower governance levels (e.g., national governments) must check their institution designs are compliant with higher-level institutions before enactment. However, checking non-compliance of institution designs in multi-level governance is non-trivial. In particular, because institutions in multi-level governance operate at different levels of abstraction. Lower level institutions govern with concrete regulations whilst higher level institutions typically comprise increasingly vague and abstract regulations. To address this issue, in this paper we propose a formal framework with a novel semantics that defines compliance between concrete lower level institutions and abstract higher level institutions. The formal framework is complemented ...