Executable Self-Governance (GovSim-SelfGovern)

In a common-pool resource environment, agents author executable governance rules as code, receive sandbox validation feedback on them, vote to enact proposed rules, and are then bound by whatever the group has enacted in subsequent rounds, closing the loop between self-authored law and self-constrained behavior.

Properties

family: Coordination & Scaling
maturity: frontier
diagram: negotiation
whyMultiAgent: Governance only has meaning as a constraint one agent's rule places on other agents' future actions; enacting and being bound by a law requires a population of distinct agents who vote on it and then live under what the group, not any one member, decided. Distinct from the already-tracked repeated-labor-market-allocation pattern, where a designer-imposed VCG payment rule governs a one-shot bidding market with no rule-authorship step: here the agents themselves author the governing code, and enactment is a per-round collective vote that binds the whole population going forward, not a fixed mechanism handed down by the system designer. Also distinct from open-strategy-transparency, where published strategies inform but never bind counterparts: GovSim-SelfGovern's enacted rules are executable and enforced, validated in a sandbox and applied across subsequent rounds, turning strategy disclosure into a genuine binding commitment.
mast: [Cat 1][Cat 3]
useCases: [Common-pool resource governance among autonomous agent populations][Self-amending rule systems that must be validated before taking effect][Studying whether agents self-regulate (e.g., proposing exile of free-riders) under survival pressure]
source: GovSim-SelfGovern · arXiv:2609.22600

Provenance

Source: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.22600

Executable Self-Governance (GovSim-SelfGovern)

Properties

family

Coordination & Scaling

maturity

frontier

diagram

negotiation

whyMultiAgent

Governance only has meaning as a constraint one agent's rule places on other agents' future actions; enacting and being bound by a law requires a population of distinct agents who vote on it and then live under what the group, not any one member, decided. Distinct from the already-tracked repeated-labor-market-allocation pattern, where a designer-imposed VCG payment rule governs a one-shot bidding market with no rule-authorship step: here the agents themselves author the governing code, and enactment is a per-round collective vote that binds the whole population going forward, not a fixed mechanism handed down by the system designer. Also distinct from open-strategy-transparency, where published strategies inform but never bind counterparts: GovSim-SelfGovern's enacted rules are executable and enforced, validated in a sandbox and applied across subsequent rounds, turning strategy disclosure into a genuine binding commitment.

mast

[Cat 1][Cat 3]

useCases

[Common-pool resource governance among autonomous agent populations][Self-amending rule systems that must be validated before taking effect][Studying whether agents self-regulate (e.g., proposing exile of free-riders) under survival pressure]

source

GovSim-SelfGovern · arXiv:2609.22600