Social processes and agent interaction always take place in a specific context. A school of thought in social studies analyses them in the framework of institutions. We present in this paper the notion of agentmediated institutions and show how it is relevant for multi-agent systems (MAS) in general and, more specifically, for MAS that include human agents and software agents involved in socioeconomic interactions. We show how the social interactions of human and software agents taking place in the Cohabited Mixed-Reality Information Spaces (COMRIS) project can be described as such an institution, the Conference Centre institution. © 1998 Springer-Verlag London Ltd.

The research reported in this paper is supported by the ESPRIT LTR 25500-COMRIS Co-Habited Mixed-Reality Information Spaces project.

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