Abstract. Peer-to-peer (P2P) architectures exhibit attractive properties for a wide range of real world systems. As a result they are increasingly being applied in the design of applications ranging from highcapacity file sharing and global scale distributed computing to business team-ware. The objective of this paper is to outline a number of areas in which Agent techniques for the management of social problems such as decision making or fair trading amongst autonomous agents could be used to help structure P2P actions. In particular we focus on approaches from mechanism design, argumentation theory and norms / rules and electronic institutions.
Steven Willmott, Josep M. Pujol, Ulises Cort&eacut