In this paper, we investigate techniques via which a group of autonomous agents can reach
a global agreement on the use of social conventions by using only locally available
information. Such conventions play a central role in naturallyoccurring social systems, and
there are good masons tbr supposing that they will play a similarly important role in artificial
social systems. Following a short review of conventions and their use in distributed artificial
intelligence, we present a formal model that rigorously defines both our experimental …