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Moderation poses one of the main Internet challenges. Currently, many Internet platforms and virtual communities deal with it by intensive human labour, some big companies-such as YouTube or Facebook-hire people to do it, others-such as 4chan or fanscup-just ask volunteer users to get in charge of it. But in most cases the policies that they use to decide if some contents should be removed or if a user should be banned are not clear enough to users. And, in any case, typically users are not involved in their definition. Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom concluded that societies-such as institutions that had to share scarce resources-that involve individuals in the definition of their rules performed better-resources lasted more or did not deplete-than those organisations whose norms where imposed externally. Democracy also relies on this same idea of considering peoples' opinions. In this vein, we argue that participants in a virtual community will be more prone to behave correctly-and thus the community itself will be "healthier"-if they take part in the decisions about the norms of coexistence that rule the community. With this aim, we investigate a collective decision framework that: (1) structures (relate) arguments issued by different participants; (2) allows agents to express their opinions about arguments; and (3) aggregates opinions to synthesise a collective decision. More precisely, we investigate two aggregation operators that merge discrete and continuous opinions. Finally, we analyse the social choice properties that our discrete aggregator operator satisfies. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016. ; Work funded by Spanish National project CollectiveWare code TIN2015-66863-C2-1-R (MINECO/FEDER). ; Peer Reviewed

On-line communities are virtual environments where users exchange contents. Occasionally, users' interactions lead to frictions, jeopardising the proper functioning of the community. Trying to avoid frictions, on-line communities typically incorporate a regulation mechanism based on (i) norms set by the owner of the community; and (ii) human moderators. In this paper we present a participatory legislation mechanism that automatically synthesises norms for an on-line community based on users' complaints about contents. With this aim, we present an agent-based simulator to model the interactions within on-line communities. We then exploit IRON, an automatic norm synthesis mechanism, to regulate simulated on-line communities. As a result, IRON synthesises norms that prevent a user from uploading contents that users regard as unacceptable by means of complaints, hence avoiding frictions. © 2015 - IOS Press and the authors. ; Peer Reviewed

Internet-based scenarios, like co-working, e-freelancing, or crowdsourcing, usually need supporting collaboration among several actors that compete to service tasks. Moreover, the distribution of service requests, i.e., the arrival rate, varies over time, as well as the service workload required by each customer. In these scenarios, coalitions can be used to help agents to manage tasks they cannot tackle individually. In this paper we present a model to build and adapt coalitions with the goal of improving the quality and the quantity of tasks completed. The key contribution is a decision making mechanism that uses reputation and adaptation to allow agents in a competitive environment to autonomously enact and sustain coalitions, not only its composition, but also its number, i.e., how many coalitions are necessary. We provide empirical evidence showing that when agents employ our mechanism it is possible for them to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction. First, we show that coalitions keep a high percentage of tasks serviced on time despite a high percentage of unreliable workers. Second, coalitions and agents demonstrate that they successfully adapt to a varying distribution of customers' incoming tasks. This occurs because our decision making mechanism facilitates coalitions to disband when they become non-competitive, and individual agents detect opportunities to start new coalitions in scenarios with high task demand. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. ; The first author thanks the grant Formación de Profesorado Universitario (FPU), reference AP2010-1742. Arcos and Rodriguez-Aguilar thank projects COR (TIN2012-38876-C02-01/02) and Generalitat of Catalunya (2014 SGR-118). Work supported by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Galician Regional Government under agreement for funding the Atlantic Research Center for Information and Communication Technologies (AtlantTIC) ; Peer Reviewed